I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

He kissed my lips, his skin warm in spite of the cool winter wind whipping past us. His whisper would have been lost on me before, but now I heard every word. “What do you want, Raven?

I did apply for more than 200 scholarships and finally I got one, but you are telling me now “God gave it to me!” Don’t you think you are too stupid?

Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all.

Big Brother is watching you.

What a holler would ensue if people had to pay the minister as much to marry them as they have to pay a lawyer to get them a divorce.

Nothing is hidden that will not be made known; nothing is secret that will not come to light.

Coffee is a language in itself.

Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

The one who is good, is free even being a slave; the one who is bad remains a slave even being a king.