What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.