The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Hell's afloat in lover's tears.

There is a solitude of space. A solitude of sea. A solitude of death, but these societies shall be compared with that profounder site-that polar privacy. A soul admitted to itself--Finite infinity.

The little cannot bee great, unlesse he devoure many. [The little cannot be great unless he devour many.]

The artist works by locating the world in himself

Christ liveth in me. And how great the difference...instead of bondage, liberty; instead of failure, quiet victories within; instead of fear and weakness, a restful sense of sufficiency in Another.

Any time there's racism somewhere in sports, we should get it out of there because sports is a place where everything's supposed to be fair.

The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss.

I don't have any premonitions. I don't have any supernatural powers. I just have a typical woman's intuition, and I go with that.

Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.

A goal of education is. to assist growth toward greater complexity and integration and to assist in the process of self-organization - to modify individuals capacity to modify themselves.