If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster

Only silence perfects silence.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

Things go away to return, brightened for the passage

You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

As it turns out social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

I'm the worst person to tell anybody how to date.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

I never feared about my skills because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear. So if you put forth the work, what are you fearing? You know what you're capable of doing and what you're not.

More dreams are destroyed in bed than are ever found there.

If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be too late!

The speed is something dangerous but very exciting.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

Those faithful Mormon pioneers ... were willing to put everything on the altar to sacrifice for and defend their God and their faith.