each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and – evenmuch more – accumulated knowledge.

Touching him is familiar and unfamiliar. We have been here before. Also we have never been here before.

Black power is organizing the rage of Black people and putting new hard questions and demands to white America.

The mind WILL be free, or it will be dead.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

When people claim to know who I am, I can no longer act freely.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe Im attuned to current events.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Young people don't even consider that it's a good idea to be out on the fringe, which is where good ideas come from.

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.