I think of language as our first music.

I am this space my body believes in.

I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I said that love heals from inside.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.

Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.

Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

Fools take to themselves the respect that is given to their office.

I just started to see the world as it really is and it completely shocked me and changed my opinion on everything.. on life and my values and certainly my own sense of self.

It's 4:30 in the morning, it's always 4:30 in the morning.

Similarly, when you lose yourconsciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, youdon't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind.

The more ignorant you are, the quicker you fight.

If the quickness of the mind and the fluency of the tongue are too punctilious and sharp, moderate them in your activity and rest.