“Like my father and grandfather before me, I paint/these walls to the light of a torch usually held/by an apprentice, my son. Today, I wedge the torch/in a crevice as my boy crosses…

“I wonder about rich people. They never have to grow up. They just keep buying toys to amuse themselves. These horrible machines are just appliances to them. Something to make their lives easier,…

“New York is teeming with lakes, but I don’t want to know them all. A lake is more like a marriage or long-term lover; one wants to revisit a lake over many years,…

“I credit my mentor James Dickey with convincing me that the best teaching is anecdotal. He told a rapt class that when Deliverance was being filmed, the body that Dickey as the sheriff…

“Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in the spring of 1949, less than a year before its author’s death, in January 1950. In a statement published in Life magazine, addressed to the head of the…

“’There is no/such thing as/piano accompaniment’/becomes difficult/for him to say in/his mellifluous voice/of thick, dark oatmeal/However, if/‘There is no/such thing as/piano on the streets/of New York/at 9 a.m. this day/in the year of…

“Sikinos, 41 square kilometres, with a permanent population of around 330, is the least developed of the larger Cycladic islands. This may be due to the fact that it didn’t have a ferry…

“Where does ownership take us? We need only investigate reality, based on recent trends, to see where we’re headed. And that place is to the edge of extinction. To the notion that might…

“They removed all the old trees. It looks like the sort of place you see everywhere now, with a Whole Foods and a Starbucks on the ground floor and badly made astronomically expensive…

“Form can’t hold me. My fleshy vessel contains too much./Metrics can suppress a message. To say, braves feats of strength./What does the Milky Way weigh? What is the meter of galaxy?/Through math, we…