I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

It is hard to take the last step, but the hardest thing is to make a choice between the unwillingness to live and the inability to die.

Political courage requires clarity.

I think there's every reason this 21st century will be much happier.

Only he who knows God is truly moral.

The filibuster is an affront to commonly understood democratic norms, but then so is the Senate.

When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.

Everything I've done, I've done because I wanted to do it. In doing it, I've plunged in headlong, always believing in it.

Necessity is not merely the father of invention; it is the father of courage.

Fiona McCrae is a really amazing editor. Really smart and very astute about what a story needs.

I'm a politician. I'm not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists.