Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

The world is not made of molecules, the world is made of stories.

Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare