"A language is a map of our failures"

"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events"

"The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness."

"If you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces."

"I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand"

"Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude."

"- this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me."

"We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege"

"Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language."

"We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear."

"No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love."

"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities"

"She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence."

"I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed."

"Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process."

"I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well."

"This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?"

"We must use what we have to invent what we desire."

"I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet."

"Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! There's not a sob in my chest. Dry hearted Peer Gynt I pare away, no hero, merely a cook."

"The thing I came for: [...] the thing itself and not the myth"

"In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling"

"But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat."

"I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope"

"...because life is short and you too are thirsty."

"Can you remember? When we thought the poets taught how to live?"

"And yet, protest it if we will, Some corner of the mind retains The medieval man, who still Keeps watch upon those starry skeins And drives us out of doors at night To gaze at anagrams of light."

"An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim."

"The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot."

"Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence"

"Who neither touched nor spoke? whose nape, whose finger-ends nervelessly lied the hours away?"

"There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals."

"There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals."

"Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?"

"Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees"