A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.

I have become an orchid washed in on the salt white beach. Memory, what can I make of it now that might please you- this life, already wasted and still strewn with miracles?

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.

in the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak.

I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

Art has always been aware of itself as art.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

In the end I would rather wonder than know

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.

Words have a love for each other, a desire that culminates in poetry.

Is she a friend of yours?”“No, ” Diana said flatly. “She’s my mother.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

We have got so many regulatory laws already that in general I feel that we would be just as well off if we didn't have any more.

Only poor people go to jail.

My vision that I’m living is to see two more daughters get married, dance at their weddings and then lift the Lombardi Trophy several times.

It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.

Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.

'Firecracker' was such a fun song to write and to perform.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.