'You spin in the sky, the world spins under you, and you step from land to land, while we . . .' She turned her head right, left, and her black hair curled and uncurled on the shoulder of her coat. 'We have our dull, circled lives, bound in gravity, worshiping you!'

I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.