“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Under the seams runs the pain.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.

Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.

Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don’t anymore. But I still enjoy it – just the physical act and all the – the whole business of making a thing out of language.

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

I see little hope for a nation that values the health of its livestock more than that of its people…

The prudent man really frames his own fortunes for himself.

Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease.

And I have to find a way to emotionally survive playing this.

The axe is fifteen pounds

The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations

The man who masters his own soul will forever be called conqueror of conquerors.

Art is man’s refuge from adversity.