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

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

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

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.