I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.

We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.