Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

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

I don't care what you say to me. I care what you share with me.

The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.

I am a rank individualist.

I think my favorite sound is the sound of someone not playing the bongos.

I think I get some of my love of adult books that can be fun from Douglas Adams.

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

True discipleship is for volunteers only. Only volunteers will trust the Guide sufficiently to follow Him in the dangerous ascent which only He can lead.

For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

It's always nice to get out there and kind of put Boston College on the map, because we're not one of those schools that is seen nationally by everybody.

I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.