The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don't get you then the whiskey must.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.