“I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.”

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

He stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things.

You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.

And I’m not sure if he [made his comments on Trayvon] because he was asked a question and he was trying to be diplomatic and neutral – that can’t happen.

In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.

So I always like to dissect the scene and try to get some hint about what the author was trying to get at.

There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.

My father is a very caring and generous individual.

Help yourself, and Heaven will help you.