“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”

That … is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.

…and yet I am what they think I am.

I am nobody but myself.

Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?

Commercial rock ‘n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

Selfish is caring for ourselves at others’ expense … Self-care is taking care of ourselves so that we can be there for others.

Trauma really does confront you with the best and the worst. You see the horrendous things that people do to each other, but you also see resiliency, the power of love, the power of caring.

I don’t care if you’re obscene, filthy, horrendous — as long as you’re honest.

The big-name stars . . . are always going to be playing what they’ve played before if they want to remain so-called A-list stars. That’s why someone like Johnny Depp is doing more interesting roles not caring about the size of the movie.

When you care about perfection, you care about an expectation. But there is also caring for where I am right now, for what’s happening right now.

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath.

The greatest gift God has given me is the capacity of love for people. I have so many faults, but caring about people is not one of them.

I’m very happy with this new record. It’s dealing with different aspects of love-it’s me making a statement about people doing something with their lives. It is about caring for others.