I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

I can't remember the past, or I can't see very clearly, or I've gotten older and the person I was isn't there anymore, and the place I grew up isn't where I live now.

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

Each of us is present, but partially.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

Reality is a dream that someone was brave enough to conquer.

I suppose that means you don’t want any band-aids, either, ” I said, a touch more bitterly than I’d meant to.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, —the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.

I choose to express myself.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.