When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

There is no country but the heart.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.