We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?