And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.

How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.