"Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me from egocentricity and its propensity to bisect, mis-state, misunderstand and obliterate continuity?"

"O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"

"that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder."

"You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

"Blessed the man whose faith is different from possessiveness - of a kind not framed by 'things which do appear' ( Hebrews 11:3)"

"There is hate's crown beneath which all is death; there's love without which none is king."

"One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)"

"There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I conquered in myself what causes war"

"In Homer, existence is flawed; transcendence, conditional; ' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual',"

"My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits.""

"Although Le Guin tended to discount the distinction between dream-world and "real" world, she made a sharp distinction between the real world and the world of science fiction. When asked if there is really a difference between what we call reality and science fiction, she retorted decisively: "You bet you there is. You keep that firmly in mind. It's a fiction. You know what Marianne Moore said about imaginary gardens with real toads-sometimes there are real gardens with imaginary toads in them. But it's a mixture. Fiction writers write fiction, particularly in science fiction. People forget this and say they are describing reality or they are predicting reality. But the very most that a fiction writer can do is offer an option.""

"I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else."

"Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination"

"He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist."

"There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry."

"A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes."

"Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people."

"I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music."

"War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized."

"Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence."

"I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."

"What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it."

"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself."

"For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind."

"Omissions are not accidents."

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

"I never plan a stanza, words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure, later, I may influence or thin it."

"One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express."

"Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested ... liberate the imagination."

"Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

"You know I don't really understand much of my poetry myself. Of course, I was convinced I understood it when I wrote it !"

"I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest."

"I think books are chiefly responsible for my dogged self determined efforts to write; books & verisimilitude; I like to describe things."

"Whatever it is.. poem.. play, story..it must hold attention."

"Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery."

"I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages."

"Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again."

"And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space."

"The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions."

"It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet It's twelve poems, I call it oranges."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"By the RIAA's terms, we commit piracy every time we share files on the Internet. In reality, the RIAA pirated almost all the 400 million CDs sold in America last year, since the people who made the music didn't get paid for them."

"I argue with lots of things, but I do not argue with my ears."

"The first Greek-speaking people in the southern Balkan Peninsula arrived in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus sometime after 2600 B.C. and developed, probably due to the extreme mountainous nature of the country, their several different dialects."

"Famed civil rights activist Cornel West announced he is leaving his post at Harvard University’s Divinity School in a scathing resignation letter — accusing the institution of “spiritual rot” and describing it as in a state of “decay and decline.” In a letter shared to Twitter on Monday night, the professor of African American studies said he had taken an untenured position four years ago with the hope that he could “still end his career with some semblance of intellectual intensity and personal respect.... "How wrong I was!...” wrote West, 68... [He]... had previously been a tenured Harvard professor before he quit in 2002 — said it had become disheartening to see the institution in a state of “decline and decay.” ... The prominent black philosopher also said he received the “lowest increase possible” to his salary every year since he returned to campus. When he was recommended for a tenure review, the university rejected it over his support of Palestine, he said. He then lamented a lack of personal engagement and empathy from colleagues outside of work and academia, including how he only received two replies to news of his mother’s death in a newsletter. West said he was resigning with “precious memories but absolutely no regrets.”"

"Dr. Cornel West, one of the most important philosophers of our time"

"Cornel West is not simply a lucid African-American guide equal to the complexities of real multiculturalism, but also an authentic teacher of hope and reason."

"We need to recognize the destructive role played by the media in fanning the flames of the "Black-Jewish Conflict." Cornel West, bell hooks, Richard Green, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates, Marian Wright Edelman, Nell Painter, Albert Raby....Why are these names not as well known outside the African American community as the names of Louis Farrakhan or Leonard Jeffries? Are they, in their diversity and dynamism, less representative of the African American community?"