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

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" Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves. "

" Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance. "

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

" The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I believe that human beings are desperate, always, to belong to something larger than themselves. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again. "

" 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. "

" It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. "

" Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. "

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

" I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement. "

" Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. "

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

" Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing. "

" 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. "

" One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity. "

" 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. "