Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

March is the month God created to show people who don't drink what a hangover is like.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

A child can educate just about anybody.

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

I loved feeling special. I hated feeling special.

Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg.