I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

I figured I wasn't supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don't.

There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

We are defined by our dignity to rise above debasement. We are certainly better people for doing so.

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!

You see, you don’t want me to love you. You want the version you’ve made up. The knight, even though I’m the dragon and I always will be.

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

The man who has the sense of the body being himself cannot possibly worship God as formless; whatever worship he makes will be worship in form alone, not otherwise.

One person goes off and works in Houston the other person goes off to London and you're on the phone to each other and somebody is paying you to kiss somebody else. It's very bizarre being an actor.

The only guide to man is his conscience.