“Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!”

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!

Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.

organization is the religion of the single parent.

The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.

A flower is a plant’s way of making love.

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

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.