“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”

“The future is always beginning now.”

“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”

“Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”

“It's very hard to write humor.”

“We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”

“There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.”

“The HillI have come this far on my own legs,missing the bus, missing taxis,climbing always. One foot in front of the other,that is the way I do it.It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.Grass beside the road, a tree rattlingits black leaves. So what?The longer I walk, the farther I am from everything.One foot in front of the other. The hours pass.One foot in front of the other. The years pass.The colors of arrival fade.That is the way I do it.”

“A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”

“Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as our waywardness meansNothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,And so many people we loved have gone,And no voice comes from outer space, from the foldsOf dust and carpets of wind to tell us that thisIs the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knewHow long the ruins would last we would never complain.”

“It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.”