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?'

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

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

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.

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

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.