The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

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

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community.