It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.