Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

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

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.