After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States‘ response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

In Germany, they all thought I was a bit mental, very emotional.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve done therapy, I’ve done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing.

We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

I think a certain amount of stress in life is good. The stress of just working, which takes effort – I think it keeps you going.

I think it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything’s going to be all right, even when you’re not sure it is.

It’s very inexpensive to give a compliment.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

It is important to remember yourself.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

God knows when the end of time will come, not some fanatic… The world will end someday, but the end of the world and the end of time are two different things.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. It means to think of something over and over.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.