I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.