Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.