This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.

As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle as a mouth, as well have a hollow as a heart.

Your presence was shore where I rested/ released from the hoodoo of that dance, where I spoke/ with my true voice again.

Harriet Tubman, woman of earth, whipscarred, a summoning, a shinning

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.

It seemed to me as we were talking about Christ rising from the dead, the sun popped over the mountain. That was indicative of Christ rising - a new day. It just makes sense.

You can rewire your brain and reinvent your life at any age

Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.

There's laws that we must live by, and they're not the laws of man.

Do just one thing every day in the direction of your dreams.

Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

Foreigners are sending messages to the planets. We are sending rice and cereals to our dead fore-father through the Brahmins. It is a wise deed?

The greatest gift you can give your child is another sibling.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

Seriously, who has monogrammed pajamas?

I look at everything. That's my job. I really do, every day. I think about everything.