I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

From Jeff Greenfield: "I once asked Elie Wiesel "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "An optimist, " he said. "I have to be.

If anything interferes with my inner peace, I will walk away. Arguments with family members. All that stuff. None of it matters.

Heartbreak is the best motivation.

I find, by close observation, that the mothers are the levers which move in education. The men talk about it . . . but the women work most for it.

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.

The visible world only becomes the real world by the operation of thought

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out.

Half of tradition is a lie.