I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

To love me, my family does not need to understand me.

If you observe the pace of my breaths, you won't need to listen to my words.

I cannot help, but when danger is at hand remember always that I am here to stand -- or fall -- with you.

When we pray we link ourselves with an inexhaustible motive power.

If God came down here with the box that had the reason for living in it, I'd like to find just 2 words: The Music. That would be neat.

Yr crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put it on yr head

No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.

We only live once, since we are given the gift of life it should be our persistent endeavor to immortalize ourselves no matter what field of endeavor we choose.

I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

Not a single other creature in all the history of the world has been just as ourselves. Not another will be like us.