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.

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 you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.

Sick, twisted Abby was in love with the sick, twisted, beautiful Jake.

Habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge, and still less to the understanding, of lawful relations.

An honourable agreement among men as to their conduct toward women, and it was devised by women.

Sometimes living takes more courage than dying.

It's north and south pole. When you win you feel great, but when you lose it, it's like you've lost 10 games in a row.

Arrogance is the outgrowth of prosperity.

Jesus washes the feet of the Apostles. Are we ready to serve others like this.

He [Columbus] enjoyed long stretches of pure delight such as only a seaman may know, and moments of high, proud exultation that only a discoverer can experience.

I do not believe in a personal God.