Better immersion than to live untouched.

Better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry about money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean.

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.

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

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.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

I don't want to die leaving the world as it is right now.