I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.

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

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.