Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

In the fields and woods more than anything else all things come to those who wait, because all things are on the move, and are sure sooner or later to come your way. To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and we absorb what we enjoy. We learn things at school; we absorb them in the fields and woods. When we look upon Nature with fondness and appreciation, she meets us halfway and takes a deeper hold on us than when studiously conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge of Nature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more surely found in the open air than in the school room or the laboratory.

John Burroughs, Time and Change

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Galway Kinnell

All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of

Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

Richard Dawkins

Well, I'm working all the time to stay out of trouble!

Eminem

Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?

Steven Wright

Generally speaking, when a woman offers unsolicited advice or tries to help a man, she has no idea of how critical and unloving she may sound to him.

John Gray

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.

Neil Gaiman

one transcendent kissthat later makes lovers takesoft breaths, holding hands

Lori L. Otto

Thug Life to me is dead.

Tupac Shakur

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.

Norman Douglas