“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

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 public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, “life to the limit.

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

Every day you and I walk through God’s shop. Every day we brush up against objects of incalculable worth to Him. People. Every one of them carries a price tag, if only we could see it.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

Actually, I am loathe to admit, but I also remember freshman year of Emory – and I’m so sorry to have to admit this – but there was a Domino’s Pizza in Emory Village, where I went to college, and I was ordering a pizza.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.