For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

The only way to make a great thought great is to share it.

It is in unity that we find strength, in unity we find hope, and in unity we can stand firm as the darkness approaches. Let us stand together – and stand firm – against the many faces of hate.

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it and when he can.

No matter how good a driver you are, you have to have the right car and the right team behind you in order to succeed.

The Sorbonne should be razed and Chris Marker put in its place.

You can't complain when people appreciate what you're doing.

When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth.

What's female beauty, but an air divine, thro' which the mind's all gentle graces shine? They, like the sun, irradiate all between; the body charms because the soul is seen.

Who knows, I have always lived one day at a time. Probably more adventure and excitement.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.