language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.

Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

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.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

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.