Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
"Still I Rise"
Source: And Still I Rise (1978)
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
“may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back”
Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
“You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.”
"Still I Rise"
And Still I Rise (1978)
Context: You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Tim Curry Plunges Ahead Into the Past, Part IV http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/24/theater/tim-curry-plunges-ahead-into-the-past-part-iv.html (January 24, 1990)
