The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

We all cross a hundred peaks to get even this far. And there will be more before we each make it to whatever God has fated for us.

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

We got no wealthy black people. We got rich people. Shaq is rich. The guy who signs his checks is wealthy.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

You can't slow down intense people. They have to burn at their own rate.

What children need is the conviction that satisfaction can and must be earned. ... Spoiled children do not learn the must.

If you expect nothing, you're apt to be surprised. You'll get it.

music isn't just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that - it's an ideology. you can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.