“Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.”

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.

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

the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.