Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

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

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.