“It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.”

“I have become an orchidwashed in on the salt white beach.Memory,what can I make of it nowthat might please you-this life, already wastedand still strewn with miracles?”

“It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.”

“I study nature so as not to do foolish things.”

“It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.”

“In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,”