There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy grassroots organizing and electoral politics.

Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.

The more poetry you have in the head the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

I've also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament - it was about 1982 - they called it Peace Sunday.

I think you can judge from somebody's actions a kind of a stability and sense of purpose perhaps created by strong religious roots. I mean there's a certain patience a certain discipline I think that religion helps you achieve.

The fairest thing in nature a flower still has its roots in earth and manure.

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

I knew of course that trees and plants had roots stems bark branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.