The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

For few matters you need to be solo, for some matters you need soul mate and for many matters you need society,

With self discipline, self study is possible.

Happiness is a state of mind. It's just according to the way you look at things.

Grief is always sudden as winter, no matter how long the autumn.

I have everything in my house organized to an unnecessary T, and I love it! The only downside: I have no excuses for losing my to-do lists.

Your immune cells are like a circulating nervous system. Your nervous system in fact is a circulating nervous system. It thinks. It’s conscious.

It's just so hard to feel good, you know?

I'm so not a party person. I'm so not social and don't go to parties.

If you haven't experienced it, it's not true.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.