Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

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

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.

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.