There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.
To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.
There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.
Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.
Sometimes it's other people's voices you have to shut out.
What I really try to do is take different pages out of different players books.
The dinosaurs aren't remembered for much more than their bones. When humanity's gone, what do we give to this little planet that we're on, and what could we do collectively, removing the pride?
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.