I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I write what's given me to write.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

It is the road you take that decides your destiny and not your destiny that decides the road you take.

Start each morning with appreciation, love, and gratitude.

Does my grandma count as a bodyguard?

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

You don't wanna go eggin' him on. It'll never be my chair that your on, crown so tight that it cuts off circulation to the brain no oxygen. Other words there's no heir to the throne.

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. . .

To believe is to become what you believe.

I'm Christian. Growing up in Ethiopia, it's half-Christian and half-Muslim. You grow up with Muslim kids. I'm very much aware of their religion.

The Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree.

Values linger on after the social structures which conceived them.