“I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.”

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

Writing is a delicious agony.

My happy thoughts help create my healthy body.

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

Sometimes forgiveness is off the table. When the hurt is real you can’t forget. But you can walk away. That’s healthy too.

We are all healers who can reach out and offer health, and we are all patients in constant need of help.

Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.

Someday your life will be over, no matter how much attention you give to your health. Will you look back with regret, because you nourished your body but starved your soul?

The health of your marriage tomorrow will be determined by the decisions you make today.

I think online dating is a way of procuring people. Like Facebook and Myspace, it’s the way that people connect now and procure small children and sometimes dodgy relationships. I don’t think it’s very healthy.