Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.

It's not at all hard to understand a person it's only hard to listen without bias.

...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?