Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

a poet never feels useful.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.

We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.