We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.

Life is rose. Some look at the thorns ... some at the flower.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Once you’ve gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it’s a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it’s not around. Or maybe it’s just me.

If you're on the merry-go-round you have to go round.

Freedom comes from strength and self-reliance.

I was never invited to the White House.

Most conservative and progressive talk radio is primarily just that - bloviated opinion and whacky viewer calls.

I like to tell people that I finally found something I'm really good at, and that's retirement.

We've had Audrey Hepburn, we've had Twiggy, we've had Veruschka, we've had Kate Moss. I'm trying to figure out why I am to blame for skinniness.

A hard word follows us and later falls upon him who pronounced it, like a ray of vengeance.