When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

We make the path by walking.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

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

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.