The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.