“When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet”

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.

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

We have lived with violence far too long.

It’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

I love to love. However, you won’t see anybody walking the red carpet with me until I’m married.

There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.

The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet.

So wherever the action is happening, we’re taking pieces from that red carpet.

One man’s pet-stained carpet is another man’s Twister game.

The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined.

If anyone has a new idea in this country, there are twice as many people who keep putting a man with a red flag in front of it.