The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.