Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.