I always entertain great hopes.
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?
Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.
The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean- Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition.
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.
A champion of the workingman has never been known to die of overwork.
Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.
There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won’t, and that’s a wife who can’t cook and will.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars – on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.
Don’t be an agnostic. Be something.
The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Fortunately, we don’t need to know how bad an age is. There is something we can always be doing without reference to how good or bad the age is.
Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.
As it is more blessed to receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.
The people I want to hear about are the people who take risks.
If you remember only one thing I’ve said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don’t know what it’s all about.
A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.