Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers.

We started out as five people whose lives just happened to cross paths. By the end of the summer we were family

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.

The ear of the bridled horse is in the mouth.

Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.

In fast moving markets, adaptation is significantly more important than optimization.

Life is a precious gift, but we realize this only when we give it to others.

Life never tires of testing the proposition that life must go on.

Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.