I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.

The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

A poem is a small machine made of words.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.