To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion.