“Answer, if you hear the words under the words- otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

“Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.”

“Remembering your mistakes more acutely than any minor success. This was the worst. The things that kept you up at night. Tip a waiter that was too small. The words that didn't fit the moment. Words that didn't come till to late. You could kill yourself in increments, punishing your spirit day after day-regret. Guilt. Not the guilt of the little girl who woke in the night embarrassed God was mad at her because she had ticked balls under her shirt, pretending to have breasts. "I even felt sexy." That was sweet, and pure, no crime at all. But the crime of obsessive replay-get rid of it, get rid of it. Who could ever have known that hardest punishments would be the ones you gave yourself?”

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.”

“I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world.”

“To know the difference,you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields wakingto your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills.In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands.”

“our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.”