The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.

Take the so-called standard of living. What do most people mean by "living"? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science, in its finite but unbounded wisdom, has succeeded in selling their wives.

the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.

My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world - unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

...sunlight is (life and day are)only loaned:whereas night is given(night and death and the rain are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility