Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

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

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.