The moon twangs its silver strings;The river swoons into town;The wind beds down in the pines,Covers itself with stars.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.

I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!

...The locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy’s interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life’s meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.

Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives.