"I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn't ever able to say what I felt out loud...."
"I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn't ever able to say what I felt out loud. I didn't know how to say it. Posting online presented itself as a comfortable medium. I could say what I wanted to say in a way I still felt comfortable. Whenever, however I wanted to."
"To ask questions can become the laziest and wobbliest occupation of a mind, but when you must yourself answer the problem that you have posed, you will meditate your question with care and frame it with precision."
"I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."
"I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'"
"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events."
"I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc."
"We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that."
"Yield not to calamity, but face her boldly."
"The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations."
"My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of 'The Body In The Library.'"
"I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits."
"Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all."
"Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?"
"Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago."
"Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest and admiration."
"I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry."
"But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both."
"There are three things which the public will always clamor for, sooner or later: namely, novelty, novelty, novelty."
"Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it."
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
"Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem."
"What is newest to one in foreign countries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while."
"Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it."
"A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others."
"They think they have God Almighty by the toe."
