Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.