Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.