Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

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

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

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

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

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.