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

“Or one meaning of here is in this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of, or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebodyHere...”

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

“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...”

“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 ...”

“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 comple...”

“Not everyone may not think the way you do.”

“I think you're wrong.""Think what you like.”

“To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“There are more places you haven't heard of then you're heard of!' I loved that”

“I follow a dairy-free and gluten-free diet, which can be challenging in some places.”

“I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.”