Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

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