“A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.”

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

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.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.

I’ve always been alone. I grew up alone. I like it that way. Even when I’m in an arena surrounded by 10,000 people, I’m alone in my head.

God asks for men who are totally broken and who will follow Him even to death to work for Him.

I’m swimming every day and I’m even trying to get the golf swing working again – but that might take a little bit longer.

It is surprising to notice that even from the earliest age, man finds the greatest satisfaction in feeling independent. The exalting feeling of being sufficient to oneself comes as a revelation.

I guess anything in excess is no good for you, even things that are supposed to be healthy.

Unbeliever is he who follows predestination even if he be Muslim, Faithful is he, if he himself is the Divine Destiny.

It just seems like we get more popular every eight years or so. For some reason, it becomes cool to like Motorhead again.

I don’t miss anything by being a bachelor. I don’t know any happily married couples, not even my parents.