Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

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

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

I broke down all conclusions into illusions and confusions.

No circumstance, person, or difficulty can stop the plans and the promises of God.

Mistakes are their own instructors

A bad reader soon puts to flight both wise men and fools.

After three takes, [George Clooney] is like, 'We got it,' and I'm still thinking, 'I'm just getting used to this. I shouldn't have done it in a Russian accent.' No, he's great. He's a good guy.

Clearly I am a very strong, top-of-the-line, always-rising-to-it personage.

The vaccinations are not working, and they are dangerous.. We should be working with nature.

Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.

Most of our oldest memories are the product of repeated rehearsal and reconstruction.