Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person, ' he said. 'You can never go home.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

The old paradigm was pay to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You've got to be willing to play to play.

When the petals of the heart unfold, fragrance spreads across the valley.

In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

What isn’t clear, isn’t French.

Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself.

Nothing succeeds like address.

I was annoyed from the start by the attitude of doubt by the spectators that I would never really make the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to succeed.

The face, not the woman is the attraction.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.