Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

Poverty is the stepmother of genius.

But it is not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating — unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets — the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all.

I'm bereft of poetry on this planet, from where the beauties of Creation are vanishing away furiously.”

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

The loneliness is the mother of wisdom.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.