Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.