There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

Adulthood has something to do with not choosing any of the pure points of view, but living about half of what you really want to live.

A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.