I decided to be what crime made of me.

She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .

One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.