To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.