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.

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 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.

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.

You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone

I don't need a speech. I have all I need to say right up here. He pointed at his head in confidence.

Whenever you feel like criticzing any one, " he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you've had.

A man will do astonishing things for a woman he is ardent about.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

We all have souls of different ages

Let us continue to strive together for a more inclusive, democratic, and peaceful future for us all.

"Equestrian", by the by, is the gayest word in the English language. In fact, I thought Brokeback Mountain should have been called Two Equestrians.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged.

Has the pope questioned the faith of any communist leaders? He spends a lot of time in communist countries.