All is context. Choose yours carefully, where you have a choice.

I think the team will think this was an O.K. year. Some guys had career years, but the reality is that we didn't get it done at the end of the day.

All poetry is political, to some degree.

If anxiety is the major force of our contemporary condition, a lot of poetry - including my own, mostly - sort of tries to escape that, fly off into magical thinking or bewilderment or whatever.

I think no matter how snarky you try to be, poetry will always find a way to make a spiritual goal out of what you're doing.

Poetry is a way of always paying attention to the world for me; a way of letting the world stick to me instead of being anxious or estranged, just being present in the world.

Take control. You are a strong, independent woman.

Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four.

Love is like life-merely longer.

I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.

The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.

Never fear the golding of a sunset. It means more than just the closing of another day. But marks the brightness of a new dawn.

Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.

Many ALS patients end up fading away quietly and dying. For me, this was not OK. I did not want to fade away quietly.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.