Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it al out. This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular. It will never again be exactly repeated.

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.

Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'