Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.