Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

from the complications of loving you i think there is no end or return. no answer, no coming out of it. which is the only way to love, isn't it? this isn't a playground, this is earth, our heaven, for a while. therefore i have given precedence to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods that hold you in the center of my world. and i say to my body: grow thinner still. and i say to my fingers, type me a pretty song. and i say to my heart: rave on.

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.