When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.