The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

The best bet is to bet on yourself.

Appearances are but a glimpse of what is hidden.

I didn't really think about the sound of my songs before I started recording things in the studio.

They say you can't do it, but sometimes it doesn't always work.

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition.

The hunger of passions is the greatest disease.

No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.

God is kind, but he is not soft. He takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life change.

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me.