Desire can make anything into a god.

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

I think I might have secretly wished for you to exist all my life but never knew how to admit it.

we are houses eaten by rivers because we do not know their smell.

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden?

Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I wear whatever I want whenever I want. I don't call it drag; I don't even call it cross-dressing. It's just wearing a dress.

I'm a content person and I'm content knowing that I gave it my all when I was president.

The best exercise in the world is to bend down and help someone up.

Yes, hardships come. But I see in my life and in the lives of others how often something that does not have to be held as a hardship is dealt with by the mind as though it is.

AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature.

Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.