Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.