Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

A token of ecological awareness in a society devoted to self destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

The pack of media brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven weeks. Sol realized then what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called "public's right to know".