I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?