The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

Anything you say can and will be used against you, so only say my name.

Fear of facing the grasp of death changes one's outlook on every little thing.

Unless we do something and do it quickly, we may be going back to an economic stone age.

Not just as a black woman, but as a woman, since the beginning of time, beauty has been our responsibility.

See, when you lie to me it hurts," Rixon said, swiping an imaginary tear. "I thought we had something special. I thought our joint eternal sentences of damnation were our bond.

Anomalocaridids seemed to lack front limbs, being an arthropod - being a joint-legged animal - and not having legs, it's kind of embarrassing.

Haven't you noticed that every time the government f-ks up McDonald's has a new sandwich?

The antidote to the lust of the flesh is integrity.

To be a Prodigal's favourite,-then, worse truth, A Miser's pensioner,-behold our lot!