I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

No bikinis on a first date.” He nods. “I’m sure that’s a rule. Or should be. For my sisters anyway.

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.

If you were able to fall a hundred times as a child and rise, you are able to fall a thousand times as a grown up and soar.

I believe consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex.

Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

In my vocabulary, the word "compromise" is synonymous to the word "life".

An occupying power has no right to make significant alterations in the character of the occupied society, to change the laws all around, without a strong security reason and so forth.

[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.

There’s a human out there who is killing off Dark-Hunters, and someone needs to stop them.” – Andy “Well, that’s just plain rude.” – Sundown

My name is Four,” I say. “Call me ‘Stiff’ again and you and I will have a problem.