Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.

the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves

You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

We cannot create what we can't imagine.

Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.

In the world, the disappointed or annoyed person seeks revenge

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

Sometimes if I stick in a character too much I feel like I might start to get blinkered, because I'm making my decisions too definite.

You can awaken each day to obligations you never chose — or you can decide now to choose them.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

A dictator must fool all the people all the time and there's only one way to do that, he must also fool himself.