I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don't want to cheat.

You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

Everything is up for grabs, everything is relative. Except nothing is if you are serious about it because the moment you become serious about answering a question you have a stake in it. Relatively goes out of the window, in one sense because you're putting your a** out there - you are depending on the answer, you need the answer.