In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult.

A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

the wasting of time is the most personal, most private, most intimate form of conversation with oneself, as well as with another.

A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.

Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.