Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions.

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!

The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single footprint.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its essence.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

Drink nothing without seeing it sign nothing without reading it.

I just don't see the light. Where is the light? What am I in this for?

The woman's vision is deep-reaching, the man's far-reaching.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.

More than ever before, there is a global understanding that long-term social, economic, and environmental development would be impossible without healthy families, communities, and countries

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another

I don't want to get into autobiographies, I don't want to talk about myself.

Listen . Keep silent . You are not gods mouthpiece. Try to be an ear.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done. And then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.