While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.