In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude