When war is declared, truth is the first casualty
I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
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.
You won't catch Liberal Democrats describing trade unionists as wreckers.
In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.
What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.
As human beings, what makes us able to empathize with people is a connection that is not necessarily understood mentally.