“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding”

“It wasn’t like a first kiss because we knew each other too intimately for that. And it wasn’t like a last kiss because we’d only just begun. It was the kiss you spend your whole life waiting for. The kiss you wish would swallow you whole so you’d always be living it. This was the kiss of a lifetime, shared with a woman I’d spent a few lifetimes waiting for.”

“don’t make me walk back without being beside you, holding your hand.” He lowered one arm from my waist to draw my hand to his lips. “I’ve lived for two hundred years with only the imagination of what it would be like to touch this,”—he moved my hand over his mouth, kissing each knuckle—“to hold this . . .” When my breath became weak, he lowered it from his lips, but kept it firmly in his hand. “Please allow me to escort you back to the house?”

“Talk to strangerswhen the family fails and friends lead you astraywhen Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay.'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms:in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm,and when you finally take the time to see what they’re aboutperhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out.”

“she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun”

“How does a guy like you promise someone forever at eighteen?”“Easy,” he said, pressing a soft kiss into the corner of my mouth. “He finds a girl like you.”

“I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.”