What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

A traditional Englishman drinks tea to the point where his blood has long-since been replaced with an infusion of Ceylon, Assam, and Darjeeling.

You have to block everything out and be extremely focused and be relaxed and mellow too.

As far as rap goes, I grew up in Hollis, Queens, so early influences were people like Run DMC and LL Cool J.

The tensions are always based on financial resources. Something like film is very problematic because it is viewed as an art form and also as an industry with a pure commercial base.

I'm looking for uncommon people.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

Actually, all I ever wanted to be was the best in my field.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

A good tale evil told were better untold, and an evil take well told need none other solicitor.