I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.

We call "happiness" a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy.

That's the difference between girls and women: Girls find men fascinating. Women know better.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

I've always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask.

Mozart is the musical Christ.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.

If I like the story and it's well written, and it's a character I want to play and they'll pay me, then I decide to do it.