I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.

During the patriarchal time, the men were always and invariably dominant, legally and socially in marriage, so now it's possible to remodel the entire house of marriage, put in new footings and new joists and a new sort of interior. That is exactly what some men and women are now doing.

Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music.