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.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.

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.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.