"The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive."

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“I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times.”

“Full interview with Wallace Shawn”

“A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence.”

“I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript.”

“I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Even though I'm president of the United States, my power is not limitless. So I can't dive down there and plug the hole. I can't suck it up with a straw. All I can do is make sure that I put honest, h…"

— Barack Obama

Politics1961

#truth

"In a world, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself."

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosophy1905–1980

#friendship

"You will have a way which you would need to design the thing, you get to a climax and you need to stay up there and let people go home with that feeling of patriotism and so on."

— Esi Sutherland-Addy

#Philosophy

"A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understand…"

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Science1786–1845

#wisdom