Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

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

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.