Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 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. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.