I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.

I came to love, I came into my own.