We're either nothing or a God's regret.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

There is absolutely no reason for being rushed along with the rush. Everybody should be free to go slow.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

It's hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it, and what's in between doesn't make much sense.