Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.