"To me, poetry is a rational act. I never write a poem if I'm not sure what I am going to say or what I want to communicate."

“During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.”

“What is needed, however, isn't just that people working together be nice to each other. It is discipline. Discipline is hard--harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can't even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”

“We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.”

“If I am lucky and find material that is interesting to me, I want to make it.”

“There would be no value in worship services and symbols did they not, preserved in their Purity and Beauty, serve as aids to right living.”

“Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God.”

Source : "Behind the Music: Gregorian Trap at En Noir Spring 2014" by Stelios Phili, www.gq.com. September 13, 2013.

“Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.”

“When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.”

Source : Jenny Offill (2014). “Dept. of Speculation”, p.49, Vintage