Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.

Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten, you'll still have your stars.

Only boring people are bored in relationships.

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

I hope to work support my children and die quietly without pain.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

The premise, to me, is the most important thing that you have to know going in. It's the problem as you see it. So I write down the problem as I see it. That is the premise for my book.

Each nation has its own peculiar method of work. Some work through politics, some through social reforms, some through other lines. With us, religion is the only ground along which we can move.