“Hey you —All our fevered history won't instill insight,won't turn a body conscious,won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.”

“And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.”

“A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.”

“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.”

“I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.”

“It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex. We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that's too complex.”

“There is/no reasoning with need.”

“Hey you —All our fevered history won't instill insight,won't turn a body conscious,won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.”

“-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.”

“In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.”

“Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.”