“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.”

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? – Through whose blood am I to wade ?

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

I may die of earthly love, or of devotion.

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Shame bleeds through generation to generation. That is not the legacy I wish for you.

Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?

Misery doesn’t love just any company it desires the kind presence only loneliness feeds but that’s not love at all. – love doesn’t eat it bleeds.

I woke up with the warrior in my blood.

It’s in my genes. My mother was an opera singer. I’m clearly dramatic.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop–you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

Just as it demands blood, to meet bone, It’ll forever take something painful to understand pain.