I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it.
At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.
You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.
My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.
It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.
For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.
We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
I’m not lesbian; I’m not bisexual; I’m not straight. I’m just curious.
I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.
I don’t generally read reviews.
Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.
I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.
I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States’ response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
