Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt..

Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and ….

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in yo….

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But ….

That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity.….

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it..

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer..

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild..

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every peta….

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, yo….

If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or ….

There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest po….

I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you ….

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said..

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when t….

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards..

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for….

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon..

Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro a….

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards..