If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

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.

I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

Can't look at the damage that's been done, it's not healthy. Have to look ahead of it. Can't change what I've done, only what I'm gonna do.

It is pointless and impossible to maintain a modern ideology based on inaccurate memories of a dead and distant past.

I don't know how to be anything but pretend, " I replied, and it ached in me how true that really was. "But if I could be real, I'd be real for you.

I used to compete with my brother to see who could get the most Halloween candy, I remember doing that.

[To the audience at her farewell concert:] You have always given me more than I gave to you ... You were the wings on which I soared.

I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another

I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

Smiling the boy fell dead.