What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.

In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor.

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.