We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

When they shall paint our sockets gray And light us like a stinking fuse, Remember that we once could say, Yesterday we had a world to lose.

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

My mother never forgave my father

The ear writes my poems, not the mind.