Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.

Don't let someone get comfortable with disrespecting you.

There is a power within and without. If you ask, it answers. It's just a matter of being calm and wise and listening. It takes years.

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.

The appeal to force is the abandonment of reason.

I owe it all to little chocolate donuts.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

The world is whole beyond human knowing.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.