Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.