“Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.”

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.

Don’t fear the darkness if you carry the light within.

Fortune is no real thing. But men who cannot bear what comes to them In Nature’s way, give their own characters The name of Fortune.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

It seemed the harmonious echo from our discordant life.

Although man is not armed by nature nor is naturally swiftest in flight, yet he has something better by far – reason.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

You can’t fight a battle you don’t think exists.

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.