“In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make.”

“Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact little wall. If he went on making little walls like that, he could build some street for himself alone; only he would know where these streets led, and everybody else would be lost there. He would remake the city, pile up mountains high as houses, which no one would be able to tell from real houses. But perhaps by now all the houses had turned to snow, inside and out, a whole city of snow and with monuments and spires and trees, a city could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way.”

“Bring forth what is within you and you will live from what you bring forth. Do not bring forth what is within you and you will die from what you do not bring forth.”

“Sometimes life in my dream-come-true was uncomfortable, like waving good morning and smiling at strangers. That felt foreign to me. And I had never lived in a world where I was the only Latino. In New York City I could hide in plain sight, like a cactus in the desert. In Connecticut, I was a palm tree among spruces."- excerpt from Confessions of an Internet Pornogrpaher”

“If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfireSo the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them”

“My only real solace? Sleep. In the absence of an explanation of anything, for everything, I live for it and what it can bring.”