Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!

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.

If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / And I love being alive.