“That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.