We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt.

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.