You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.

The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean- Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition.

The only way out is through.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

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.

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.