People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

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?

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

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.

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the mext moment

Without a goal or an obstacle you're just running through a green cricket pitch for the rest of your life.

I don't want to be remembered as a woman from Saint Louis who died. I want to be remembered as a woman from Saint Louis who left and actually did something with her life. Then died.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

Men are unwise and curiously planned.

Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you'll have no sense of strategy.

Old hippies don't die, they just lie low until the laughter stops and their time comes round again.

In fact, I have a problem with too much money... I can't reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.

The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.

It’s making a statement about what life is, really. And I’m going to end the line with it.