To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.