"Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act."

"A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face."

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

"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."

"In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress."

"Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered."

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh."

"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."