Death is a Pepsi truck with no place to go. Dying is wham, feeling like the world's biggest fuck-up and being jerked up and out of it all. Like a puppy being lifted out of its box by the nape of its neck. Like a chess piece being removed from the board by an angry player. Wham, jerk, gone.

Those who ignore history's lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them ... they may be forced to die by them.

It's easy being a god. If you have the right equipment.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Power--a currency that never went out of style.

I now understand the need for faith--pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith--as a small life preserver in the world and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.

All research suggests that life on this Earth is an accident, that if you take a kettle of primordial soup and shake it enough, shock it enough, even freeze it enough, you get organic compounds. Allow these compounds to suffer random accidents long enough and you get life. That's life with a capital L. The fundamentalists are outraged that something as sacred and important as Life could be an accident. They want it to be a result of a command, a plan, a blueprint, a simple, orderly, well-engineered, easily understood project designed by a deity who ... would figure all tolerances and fudge them by a safety factor of five or ten. Well, fuck them. Accidents happen. We're one of them.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be--should be--a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days.

For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

Life is brutal that way ... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

Time sure kicks the shit out of people.

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Pain ... has a structure. It has a floor plan. It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral.... it is a poem.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

The great attraction and the great danger of passion is that it is something outside of oneself, a strong wind from nowhere in the face of which the forest of everyday thought and behavior cannot stand.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

War must never be a condition but, rather, a temporary scourge which we suffer as a child does a fever, knowing that health follows the long night of pain and that peace is health.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

You have to live to really know things.

Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

In hopelessness there is always hope.

Great powers may be shaping the general turn of events, but human personalities still determine their own fate.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

The essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things--the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.