I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

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

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

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

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

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