Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.