“Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them?”

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

“He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.”

“In the end, it's not what we keep our children from that will save them. It's what we put into them in the first place.”

“When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?”

“He did not know how the world is simplified for kings. To them, all men are subjects.”