“That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.”

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

A language is a map of our failures.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they’re all motion pictures. There’s a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

You’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!

Sometimes you have to know when to shut the f – – up.

Now, the political class tries to make sense of all of this, but they can’t, because never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today.

There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms.

The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.