If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

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

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.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

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

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?