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

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

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

We have lived with violence far too long.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.