Eating is never so simple as hunger.

Solitude is un-American.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

In loving life you love what can't survive.