In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review (in an article about writers and what they’re reading) Edwidge Danticat wrote that she’s reading Nikki Giovanni’s new collection of poems, Acolytes,  and said in one of the poems from the book Giovanni seems to address writer-readers directly and “outlines a possible mantra”: 

                       We seek and hide

                       We break and mend

                       We teach and learn

                       We write

What mantra or quotation do you have taped to your computer?  What poem or prose excerpt inspires you to write every day?

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:  If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.    

– Toni Morrison