Caine was a murderer. A liar. A cad. A skulker in shadows and a heartless wretch. What sort of woman or God would love someone like him?

I've crossed a world of sand and tears in search of you.

Kas was right: a woman could destroy a man. This one could do so, simply by knowing his name. She could do so, simply with her eyes.

He smelled the salt on his own lips and the orange blossoms in her hair. Real ones, he could see now, tucked into the curls with cheap, native combs. The sight of them gave him hope.

Looking back at him was a man who was battered and broken.And alive, for the first time in his life.

He wanted to die. He prayed for it. Through the roar in his ears, he begged for it.

He heard the voice that had called to him in dreams, had saved him from the sands and from following his brother into the river.

Kent had begun sleeping with his good eye open, for he knew the mark of sedition when he saw it. Even partway blinded, who could see it better?

Pay attention to me.

Poetry is breathing words that gives a reader pause.

Your mind is like a tunnel that has no end, and a baloon, that even too much air cannot burst.

Never put off until tomorrow that which may be avoided entirely.

I grow dizzy when I recall that the number of manufactured tanks seems to have been more important to me than the vanished victims of racism.

I was not influenced by Jack Benny, and people have remarked on my timing and Jack's timing, but I don't think you can teach timing. It's something you hear in your head.

I don't have any tattoos but I've thought about getting Ernie, from Bert and Ernie, on my earlobe. He made a big impression on me as a kid. And I have pretty big earlobes.

Boys like him didn't die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries.

Blind folk see the fairies. Oh, better far than we, Who miss the shining of their wings Because our eyes are filled with things We do not wish to see.

This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.