If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.

Make up a story…For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

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

Anger is a paralyzing emotion, you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling. I don’t think it’s any of that. It’s helpless. It’s absence of control and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers, and anger doesn’t provide any of that. I have no use for it whatsoever.

I tell my students, when you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

You are your best thing.

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphemate.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one your drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Love is never any better than the lover.

Lonely, ain’t it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something. A secondhand lonely.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

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

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

If was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

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

Something that is loved is never lost.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place, the picture of it stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did , or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.

If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.