Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.

Our spaceship is a tiny bubble in a glass of God.

We got to keep on being a success.

Anything that happens gradually is always irrevocable.

The question of education has nothing to do with the question of the vote. On numerous occasions it has been proved in history that people can enjoy the vote even if they have no education.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

So I very quickly stopped almost all decoration. I was interested in the three-dimensional form of the pots, but my decoration was nonexistent.