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

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.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

If the caged birds think whoever scattering grains for them that person is their deity, what should we Kurds call the person who will grantee us an independence.

Knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts.

Half Man, Half Sit-Out-The-Season.

I'm always surprised that I'm still around funk and that people are still into it.

I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.

Don't think OF the market. Think AS the market.

The best work comes from people who are motivated by crisis. When something stops their original idea, they respond by coming up with something even better.

And none at all has ridden at the king's side since Aerinha, goddess of honor and flame, first taught men to forge their blades. You'd think Aerinha would have had better sense.

Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.