They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

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

The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination.

Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.