Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

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.

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream?

It is better to seek purity than the pleasure of sin.

When someone takes a private photo, on a private cell phone, it should remain just that: private.

I absolutely don't care about my looks and I'm so used to them that I wouldn't change a thing. I would end up missing my defects.

Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.

Accessing capital to start a business can be a daunting process, especially for entrepreneurs who start out with a great idea, but have no real familiarity with the business world

Andy Paley got us a show opening for his band at an outdoor show at Simmon's College, on a Friday.

Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?-Moths that a garment fret.The world is turned memorial, crying, "ThouShalt not forget!

Those who are late will be punished by life itself.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.