If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.