The universe is made of stories not of atoms.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

The journey is my home.

If we look long enough and hard enough ... we will begin to see the connections that bind us together, and when we recognize those connections, we will begin to change the world.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Reality is the completion of experience.

I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.

To close a fellow human being in your heart compels more respect than attending 1000 Christmas Masses.

Morality, when formal, devours.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

Tessa is gone, and every moment she is gone is a knife ripping me apart from the inside.

I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.

I spent a lot of time trying to layer upon layer upon layer as I wrote. I think that's often the fear of a writer, that little nuances won't get picked up.

It took me forty years of dealing with buddhism to finally realize that actually Buddha's discovery was happiness and bliss.