I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.