Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar.

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence.

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

I would rather live in a world where people shout, "This is wrong." than live in a world with superheroes saving the day.

No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.

The fundamental disagreement most Republicans have is they don't think health care is a right. They think it is a privilege, not a right.

I have the skills to pay the bills; you know, I can really sing, and write great songs.

Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view.

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.

Others made you into who you were. You made yourself into what you have become.

Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.