The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.