“Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.”

Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.

A man was defined not by his flaws, but by how he overcame them.

Goals, on the other hand, are specific things you have decided you need to accomplish within a clearly defined period of time.

A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

You don’t need to be defined by your job.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question…awareness of the problem outlives all solutions.