Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
Everyone is born a poet – a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It’s not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
You shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.
If you purify the pond, the lilies die.
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn’t get anywhere.
My question is “when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?” You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, ‘Is this good?’ A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That’s not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
Language can do what it can’t say.
One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.