Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.