“Who is so fancy, esoterica saves the day?Who is the Yogi, Namaste?”

“Once, I took the penny whistle you gave me and discovered a spotby the roaring falls where I could play as loud as I wanted. I lay in the bifurcated trunkof a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked t...”

“And no matter what closet we were thrown in, up what river we were sold for an embarrassment, or worse, traded for a bottle of gin--wed carry on in playful stitches, friendstil the endwhich came so...”

“If in poetry court she was calledto testify on matters whereI was condemned to imprisonment: parking my egoat a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,dealing stanzaics to children, shootingof...”

“what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of lig...”

“Theres a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage.”

“Many things have broken him. He holds himself together with spit and endless smiling, but all can see the cracks. You, though; you are dented, bruised, but intact.”

“I have a message for your daughter, said Cale. I am bound to her with cables that not even God can break. One day, if there is a soft breeze on her cheek, it may be my breath; one night, if the coo...”

“That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us”

“I will wait for you until the gold from the sun dwindles away.”

“Gold is the corpse of value...”

“Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.”

“There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. ”

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.”

“Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.”