The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

I needed to survive tonight to keep living my life as if nothing had happened.

It is a word that's quickly spoken, which being unrestrained, a heart is broken

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

Only if a child feels right can he think right.

Every picture paints a thousand words and that one said 'goodbye'

Balance is the key to a beautifully made-up face.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

Honest people have no ethics

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.