Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

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

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.