My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

People who cannot feel punish those who do.