When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears

You'll always love the person, if you're sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can't figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.

and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.