If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position [in life].