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.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

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

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.