That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.
Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.
Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. – Nick Flynn.
By the time I’m nine I know the world is a dangerous place. I’ve heard whispers about razorblades in apples, about Charlie Manson and his family. But no one is offering any clear information.
What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.
In life you get one take, and it’s perfect. It’s strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn’t have reacted that way, but that’s the way you reacted. That’s your take; that’s all you get.
The attention one gets from being a poet isnt great.
I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.
I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.
The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey – it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.
Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way – then because they also have depression, I think they’re more in touch with human suffering.
What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don’t know what it is I’m capable of transforming into.
I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be.
Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.
Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.
OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio’s genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.
It’s the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame.
I’ve come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened.