There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

Anger is really disappointed hope.

If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots.