To grow old is to lose everything.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of wood stove, oil and electric blanket. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves, partly tuber, partly bear, in the dark and its cold - around us, outside us, safely away from us. We tuck ourselves up in the comfort of cold's opposite, warming ourslves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness's idea.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.