If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.