If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

Don't write to sell, write to tell.

Temptations don't appear nearly as harmful as the roads they lead you down.

I, talking about my children, of course I wanted them to succeed in life, they have to choose whatever job or occupation that they want, I will not try to influence.

A river of words flowed between us.

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.

The blind eate many a flie. [The blind eat many a fly.]

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits

History is clarified experience.

The cares of this life emerge as very small items indeed along our daily path.