Powerlessness and silence go together.
I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.
Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.
What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
The past is a closed door.
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me – yet – the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
I tend to feel if people say they’re going to do something, they will, if given the chance.
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
Although from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.