The slum is the measure of civilization.

Some defeats are only installments to victory.

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them, good or bad.

When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.

After all, you can't truly be happy if you've never known pain. You can't truly feel joy if you've never felt heartbreak. You can't know what it's like to be filled unless you've been empty.

If we connect with nature, we can reconstruct our soul, spirit and strength.

If he'd looked like a cross between Mr. Clooney and, say, one of the hobbits, I probably would have been far more capable of coherent thought.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

There is more grace in God's heart than there is sin in your past.

Influence is like water. Always flowing somewhere.

I dropped out of college and I'm pretty much a self-educated person, so a lot of my core belief system comes from life.

I don't see any easy way of disqualifying people on the basis that they decide not to work.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.