I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.

We cannot gamble with American lives. I will not gamble with American lives.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

We cannot wish for that we know not.