I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.

As a leader, if you can no longer inspire your people it is time to step aside and let someone else take the lead

Authenticity reduces stress and produces faith in oneself and in the potential to grow and learn.

A word to the wise is sufficient.

I will always be the hopeless romantic, more often pathetic than heroic.

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

As a young man I prayed for success. Now I just pray to be worthy of it.

You can be on the cusp of something. Appreciate the cusp, not the something. Appreciate this moment now.

Cynicism is a choice. Optimism is a better choice.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.