"Can you remember? When we thought the poets taught how to live?"

"...because life is short and you too are thirsty."

"I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope"

"But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat."

"In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling"

"The thing I came for: [...] the thing itself and not the myth"

"Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! There's not a sob in my chest. Dry hearted Peer Gynt I pare away, no hero, merely a cook."

"I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet."

"We must use what we have to invent what we desire."

"This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?"

"I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well."

"Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed."

"I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail."

"She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence."

"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities"

"No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love."

"We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear."

"Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language."

"We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege"

"- this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me."

"Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude."

"I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand"

"If you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces."