“Death pulls people from our spaces so often and we accept it as our final payment for having been here and having lived, however big or small. We don’t always have time to notice how things have changed in the absence of some of them. But then death pulls away someone we love, and we find that time. In here, we notice everything; growing grass and fingernails, and songs that end in a minor key. We are too sad to do anything else but watch a clock, applying seconds, minutes, and hours to the trauma and the lacerations. Time, the forever healer, they say. We find the time to wonder how everyone else is moving on, around our paralyzed selves. Ourselves unsure of roads and trees and birds and things. It all blurs and words aren’t words anymore. We find the time to attempt to figure a way to rethink everything we thought about this world and why we came to it.”

“You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets.”

“Autumn. The grace in letting dead things fall.”

“the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.”

“The thing about dignity: it can be destroyed, but not taken unless it's given away. It can always be beautified.”

“there are no houses to wife. only window seats to occupy when the weather needs changing & waters to flow past our ankles on Sundays as we fish.”

“We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren’t sure if we were in love anymore.”

“I love you because Five floor walk up1 to the 2 to the EThree avenues”

“Watching the summer close is like watching a good kid die for no apparent reason.”

“Children teach us how to chase without overrunning.”

“Fall in love for as long as you can with the one who sees you when you are invisible.”