“Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.”

“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

“The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not.”

“It has been my experience that women tell more intimate details to their friends than men do. Men may brag more, but women will talk the nitty-gritty and share the experience more.”

“We should never, ever believe life- or history- holds no surprises for us. That way lies arrogance. And arrogance can blind us to the truth . . . Any truth. All truth.”