Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.

Whether we stay or whether we go - to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

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.

The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

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.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.