As it is more blessed to receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

If the day ever comes when they know who They are, they may know better where they are.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

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.

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.