I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.