The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.