“If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, Youre out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem? But you ...”

“Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”

“Friedrich Rckert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a whi...”

“Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.”

“Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind ...”

“There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always rememb...”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

“The moral of the tale is, don't live for the approval of others. The real you is here to find out the secret of life, not to satisfy someone else's opinion.”