“Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.”

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.

Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.

Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

Standing in your power scares a lot of people. You become something formidable, intimating, and aspirational all at once.

I don’t have a professional aspiration. But I do have a personal one: I want to continue growing as a person. I want to reach out more to people, learn more from them. Ultimately, I would like to be a great justice that people remember with respect and fondness.

Life’s too short to live without purpose, to lose our chance to serve, to let our dreams and aspirations die with us.

Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

New media is an amazing form of direct marketing in that you really get a sense of who your customer is, and you also get to know those people who may not be your customers yet but are aspirational and are hoping to be.

There is new hope among people that this dispensation can fulfill their aspirations.