“I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.”

“Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt p...”

“A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice. ”

“You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sunwho knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown o...”

“There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.”

“Images are the pegs holding down memory's billowing tent.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

“I love you like a fat kid loves cake!”

“Hard work should be rewarded by good food.”

“Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.”

“Memories of lost love they do enpain,Fleeting images of what once was never again to gain.Hold tight those memories that slip through the mind, To walk in those fields again with hera dream divi...”

“As she left the cold arena Angel had to laugh,Beaten by that of a wisp girl and her subliming cunning craft.Jove lay silent in his orbit; brooding, deep, dreamless forweep,And faithful dog Sirius r...”