“What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.”

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.

To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God’s.

I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God.

Slotted into broad diagnostic pigeonholes and provided generalized treatments that may not always meet their specific needs.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

The fool too late, his substance eaten up, reckons the cost.

Good things soon find a purchaser.

When you’re all burned up, then you become light.