His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.