The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.

It takes a long time to really be married. One marries many times at many levels within that marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out.

When you know my love, my love will warm you.

You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career.’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.

Paradise is to be the ultimate instrument, fulfilling God's desperate intent that we love each other.

Sorrow for not understanding like I understand now the unpredictable, profound journey that marriage is.

My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard."