How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns. Solution? I don't think so.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.