“Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain.”

“You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.”

“I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.”

“Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”

“How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?”

“Art is so often better at theology than theology is.”

“honestly i don't understand the rousing of romance all that well. i used to believe in this thing called fate, or destiny. a romantic romeo and juliet, monet and veronica, etc. but now i feel jaded, maybe agnostic to the idea.but choice used to seem so unromantic, as if some mystic force was not behind the meeting of 2 beautiful individuals. but now i think choice is the greater of the two simply for this fact: by choosing someone you are saying that out of all the people in the entire world i have decided that i want you apart of my life in perpetuum, for the rest of my life, and no one else.no haphazard circumstance, no chance meetings where distant planets align. it's simply two rational individuals who make a choice and an effort to remain together.”