 Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. |
| To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. |
| The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. |
| There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. |
| A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love. |
| In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress. |
| Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. |
| Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. |
| Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act. |
| I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin. |
| The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. |
| Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true. |
| Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. |
| I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face. |
