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

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.