“Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.”

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

I like Barack Obama as a person and I think he is a sincere man. I think he and his wife conducted themselves magnificently in the White House. There’s not a better role model for American kids to watch Barack and Michelle Obama, so all of that is off-the-chart positive.

Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.

The idea of kids helping other kids is such a great way to introduce children to being involved in charitable causes and volunteer work, setting them on the path to doing good for others throughout their lives.

I spar with 18-year-old kids that try to kick my ass all the time. As far as going in and doing a wrestling match, I think that pales in comparison, but it’s a totally different thing. It’s completely different. You have to condition your body.

All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average.

So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that’s part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth.