Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.

And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.