All music is is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.

Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Joy, shipmate, joy! (Pleased to my soul at death I cry), Our life is closed, our life begins, The long, long anchorage we leave, The ship is clear at last, she leaps! She swiftly courses from the shore, Joy, shipmate, joy!

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand.

When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.