Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.
it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midw...
Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,
You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.' You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?' Meredith says, 'you're your same self.' The truth of t...
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain The
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
Still, a living, breathing human being--even a boneheaded or barely articulate one--conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering--what Shakesp...
One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.
Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some in...
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how t...
Unless you’re like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.
I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadi...
Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only t...
. . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.
The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.
Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.
Nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove
You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history
Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.