I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.

What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.