Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Don't miss the blessing disguised as shit.

He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.

Time is the essence of life

Don't give up all your romance, Anne, " he whispered shyly, "a little bit is a good thing - not too much, of course, but keep a little of it, Anne, keep a little of it.

Happiness is really rooted in simplicity. The tendency to excessiveness in thought and action diminishes happiness.

Whenever you want something that you're not going to get, suddenly the whiney 3-year-old comes out in you.

The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

John Facenda could read a laundry list and make it sound like the Constitution of the United States.

There are only those you can live with, and those you can work to change.

Give lab rats oxytocin and, according to that meme, they get better at talking about their feelings and sing like Joan Baez.