“That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang.”

“There is no life without death. That is the true meaning of yin and yang”

“Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.”

“Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American. "Hooray, hooray, hooray," I'd said.”

“The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant,...”

“IN THE SUN: Sickle moon still there in daylight. // We long for things as they were. / We want them back, / our blue-black nights, and the stars.”

“I've always wanted a black girlfriend. Not as a joke, just so when we sixty-nine I can call it Yin-Yanging.”

“The absolute universe is one. Then two opposing forces appeared, and the relative world was born. In the orient this dualism is called ‘yin’ and ‘yang’, in the west, ‘plus’ and ‘minus’.”

“Taoist philosophy … is essentially monistic. … Matter and energy, Yang and Yin, heaven and earth, are conceived of as essentially one or as two coexistent poles of one indivisible whole.”

“The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.”