“I have to believe we have the option to change who we are and where we are going, anytime. This is what gives us room to hope. Every breath has the potential to begin a new era.”

“Our lives are specks of dust wasted in worry. Only one six billionth of it is about you.”

“Life is supposed to be messy. Being human means you will get our heart broken and your fingernails dirty.”

“If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.”

“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.”

“We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.”

“You men have none of you any hearts.''If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.”