For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.

When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.