I took Bobby Kennedy through the delta and he cried like a baby.
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
The moment when a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political
A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives. ' That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate, of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.
The best moments on earth are those during which we meditate upon heavenly things in general, when we recognize or defend the truth, that heavenly dweller and denizen. Only then do we truly live. Therefore, the essential interests of the soul require that we should oftener rise above the earth, upwards to heaven, where is our true life, our true country, which shall have no end.