A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.