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" Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation. "

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" Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak. "

" A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world. "

" It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. "

" When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original. "

" It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection. "

" There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation. "

" In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time. "

" The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. "

" I don't have an all-embracing vision which people have to buy. I'm simply trying to work with the struggles we all deal with every day while we're trying to live out our personal destinies and make a living at the same time. "

" Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. "

" A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. "

" It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with: it is the mother of the thing you fear. "

" All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment. "

" A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. "

" We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement. "

" To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins. "

" Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. "

" Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity. "

" Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation. "

" Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. "

" We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. "

" We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due. "

" By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar. "

" The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death. "

" A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. "

" There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there. "

" Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. "

" The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body. "

" To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past. "

" Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done. "