No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.

My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.

A real life doesn't ask you to stop and move back it always says Move On

Always take an inventory of your life

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

Shall Nature, erring from her first command, self-preservation, fall by her own hand?

we live in an age which must be amused, though genius, feeling, trust, and principle be the sacrifice.

Iraq will spread them even more and chop them up.

Haughtiness lives under the same roof with solitude.

Cleaning isn't all that interesting to me. I'm disorganized.