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.

I am this space my body believes in.

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

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.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

Dying should come easy:like a freight train youdon't hear whenyour back isturned.

Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.

It was like Percy had faced death before, like he knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You didn’t need to say you were sorry. The only thing that helped was moving on—moving forward.

But Death was cunning.

Come what may time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

Persistence is self-discipline in action.

The important thing is the 80/20 rule: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This means that if you're doing ten tasks, two are going to be vastly more important than others.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

In the sea of love, I melt like salt Faith, Doubt - they both dissolve. A star is opening in my heart . The worlds turn in it.

Affectation is the product of falsehood.