In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word too.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

The Israelis are very smart about politics and strategy, but there are a few exceptions. One is Lebanon, the other is Gaza, where they were completely inept.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

I love anything that has to do with expanding and becoming more than you can actually become. Going further than you did before.

The Pleading of the Summer - That other Prank - of Snow - That Cushions Mystery with Tulle, For fear the Squirrels - know.

I always live in the present. I never dream about what might happen. Why? It might not.

Sing your song; don't let the bastards get you down.

The man who has the sense of the body being himself cannot possibly worship God as formless; whatever worship he makes will be worship in form alone, not otherwise.