"Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.""God's way of answering the Christian's prayer for more patience, experience, hope and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.""Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.""The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.""The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.""The world looks at preachers out of church to know what they mean in it.""There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.""Wisdom prepares for the worst, but folly leaves the worst for the day when it comes."
He married Maura Stanton, and lived in Richmond, Virginia. He graduated from Indiana University.
He taught at Rhodes College.He currently works at Indiana University as a teacher of creative writing and also teaches in the Hutton Honors College.
His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, River Styx, Virginia Quarterly Review.