It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I am this space my body believes in.

I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I think of language as our first music.

I said that love heals from inside.

Every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.

You can always find an evolutionary quotation for anything. But the question is whether it's functional, which is not the same as being evolutionary.

Oh, IMDB, yeah; there's a few things on there that are TV, they're not film, some things they think we did that we didn't. There's a few inaccuracies in there. It's terrifying though, isn't it?

I was acting my way through the whole thing.

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

Creativity is our birthright. It is an integral part of being human, as basic as walking, talking and thinking.

The stress of making small talk with in-laws is called being part of a family.

it is amazin, she thinks, how simple appearances can be created - a rush, a smile, a new coat of paint, a slow, calm voice, a hug, a new dress - a resolve to keep out questions and cling to secrets

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.