“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.”

You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.

We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.

Enticing hope is like lighting candle in the dark room.

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

When there is spirit and light, the dark forces of whatever is hidden and suppressed – like hatred and separation – become more powerful.

Powers that be can’t stay in control if you have everybody in love and in tune with each other and with the planet, and in tune with the electrons and the dark matter that’s moving at the speed of light.

Sometimes we smile at a child thats afraid of the dark.

Someone asked me…how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow-townsman of ours used to tell–Abraham Lincoln.

It’s everywhere, really. It’s between the galaxies. It is in this room.

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not myTime, the flood that does not flow.