The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things ….

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh.….

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good..

I see that I must give what I most need..

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no m….

Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of ce….

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will ….

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of….

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life..

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city..

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil..

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, ….

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst..

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across th….

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: ….

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world..

The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart..

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second hist….

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful..

Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you ….