So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

And I rejoiced in being what I was.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

How terrible the need for God.

The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.

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.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.