There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.