“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”

Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don’t realize that’s a lie.

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

I done paid Gunna to write my songs. I never put the songs out but like when I first started rapping I used to pay him like $100 like ‘I’ma give you a $100 write something for me so I can try to learn to go in and record it.’

When I go out and I meet people who are suffering and they come and talk to me, Mr. T cries, Mr. T who could break a man’s jaw with his fist.

It’s incredible considering the public perception that he was tight fisted and he was more than prudent.

Like all New York hotel lady cashiers she had red hair and had been disappointed in her first husband.

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

We cannot sow seeds with clenched fists. To sow we must open our hands.

Because we know that we cannot sow seeds with clenched fists.

What we used to settle with common sense or a fist, we settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers.