What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved...Freedom is...not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.

Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

Solitude is un-American.

The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.

In any triangle, who is the betrayer, who the unseen rival, and who the humiliated lover? Oneself, oneself, and no one but oneself!