...I'm not afraid of the opinions of others - but of being needed and coming up short ...

...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...

...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ...

...no good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one...

...I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...

...true love is an irrevocable act - you can only give your heart away once - after that, you give as much as you have left ...

...wherever there is society, there is authority and the temptation to disobedience because our individual wills refuse to submit...

...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...

...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...

...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...

...is worship too strong a word? yes, I worship you - to worship is to give worth to something – isn’t that what love is all about?...

The world would have no rainbows if the sky had not storms.

If you want to feel good, be rational.

Giving someone their style or bumping up their sense of style to be a better version of what it is, is part of the fun of what I do, and I actually approached Al Sharpton. They didn't come to me.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

We all have powers within us that we don't know exist until we're tested. There are no limitations to what you can do if you have the determination.

Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.

Freedom is entirely different from revolt. There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act.

But sons are a different matter to a man. More a duty than an indulgence.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.