If you want to liberate someone, love them.Not be in love with them - that's dangerous. If you're in love with your children, you're in their lives all the time. Leave them alone! Let them grow and make some mistakes. Tell them, "You can come home. My arms are here - and my mouth is too." When you really love them, you don't want to possess them. You don't say, "I love you and I want you here with me."

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Alone, all alone Nobody, but nobody Can make it out here alone.

We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter the defeat so that we can know who we are. So that we can see, "Oh, that happened, and I rose. I did get knocked down flat in front of the whole world, and I rose. I didn't run away; I rose right where I'd been knocked down." That's how you get to know yourself.

To be human is to be challenged to be more divine. Not even to try to meet such a challenge is the biggest defeat imaginable.

You never get over the fear of writing.