“I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]”

“I’ll never stop loving you. I don’t know how and I don’t want to.”

“Some years ago I was at a committee meeting where one of the group suddenly launched upon one of the other members an astounding onslaught of abuse, vilification, and loathing from which only failing breath and imminent seizure caused him to desist. It was in fact my first experience of academic debate. The chairman, visibly shaken by the vehemence of this tirade, offered the right of reply to the person attacked, who then spoke as follows: "Mr Chairman, I did not say what I said with the specific and deliberate intention of reducing my colleague to spluttering apoplexy; that this has in fact happened I can only regard as a bonus."From that meeting I took away an important recognition — the lurking Bonus Factor In Otherwise Unpromising Situations.”

“I love you, Kayla Martin. I want to spend the rest of my life wondering what will happen when I turn on the microwave. I want to explain the X-files to you in bed every night and replace cabinet doors that are dented from your feet.....I want to go to sleep at night knowing that you're puttering around in the other room inventing something that will baffle and confuse me.”

“It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there.”

“I was having a little vision problem.”“Oh no.” Creigh leaned in closer to him and peered intentlyinto his eyes, as if her supermom powers could see rightthrough his corneas and to the issue at hand. “What‟s wrong?” “I couldn‟t see myself going to work today.”

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”