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

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

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