“Be more than symbol, strength, and dream. / Be light! Inspire! Revive! / Redeem! (from Phoenix: Salvation)”

“Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood!”

“You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.”

“We all have our la-la-la song. The thing we do when the world isn't singing a nice tune to us. We sing our own nice tune to drown out ugly.”

“I wake up every morning and think: You know what would be good today? Not dying.”

“In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.”

“I've always believed that we don't choose the life we want, we choose the life we think we deserve. We self-sabotage as a way to punish ourselves." "Why would we punish ourselves? Doesn't the world punish us enough?" "Why wouldn't we? We live in a world that is always making us work for love. It's cause and effect.”

“One need not fight every battle, or die in the struggle, to be a hero.”