“I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.”

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

No one will ever make necessity not happen.

My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Poetry – poiesis means a thing made.

You used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.” Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

He stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

I grew up in New York and I’ve always lived here, so I look at myself as a regular person.

Love fails for you when you reject, betray and do not love. Therefore .. Love.

The stronger always succeeds.

But a rascal of a child (that age is without pity).

We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.

One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder….

I’m not an old, experienced hand at politics.