Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

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

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

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.