The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

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 think there is a choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

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.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

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.