I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven.
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
I’m somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don’t like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
One of the cool, chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod – Small letters sent To her from God.
At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that’s when empires start to decline.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.