The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

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

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

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.