Hope is the hardest love we carry.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

In the dream life, you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

The Cloudy Vase

Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

When someone buys a painting of mine and they fall in love with it, I hope they fall in love with it every time they look at it. That's why I paint. That's why I sell.