It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

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.

The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.

Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

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

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.