“Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.”

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.

I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

Strangers are an endangered species.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

Experience is always larger than language.

Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

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

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 liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

I never knew a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart somewhere or other.

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

Those wise men knew God to be in things, and Divinity to be latent in Nature, working and glowing differently in different subjects and succeeding through diverse physical forms, in certain arrangements, in making them participants in her, I say, in her being, in her life and intellect.

Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh.

As an athlete, I understood the value of my health insurance. I knew that in my profession, injuries were common and could happen at any time.

If I had a horse of my own that I loved and fed and knew me, it would be amazing.