“Waking At Night The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.”

“You can't work in a steel mill and think small. Giant converters hundreds of feet high. Every night, the sky looked enormous. It was a torrent of flames - of fire. The place that Pittsburgh...”

“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.”