“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.”

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.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

The world is not made for the prosperous alone, nor for the strong.

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.

I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.

THINK TWICE before using hot ‘merchandise’!!!

Finding that the middle condition of life is by far the happiest, I look with little favor upon that of princes.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

The men are much alarmed by certain speculations about women; and well they may be

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.