“Not that it matters, when you dream, there's no outside or in. Your mind is an unimaginable bloom. A willow catkin as big as the moon. With billions of anthers, shaking pollen like stars. It may seem strange, but in this boundless place --- You are not alone.”

“To be free means always leaving...or returning to a place where leaves never fall.”

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”

“That's why I want to speak to you now.To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”

“I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.”

“To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.”

“Saw you walking barefoottaking a long lookat the new moon's eyelidlater spreadsleep-fallen, naked in your dark hairasleep but not obliviousof the unslept unsleepingelsewhereTonight I thinkno poetrywill serveSyntax of rendition:verb pilots the planeadverb modifies actionverb force-feeds nounsubmerges the subjectnoun is chokingverb disgraced goes on doingnow diagram the sentence”