The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

Intense love always leads to mourning.

I pretended indifference…even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.

I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness—

He needed a stiff drink. With a side of straightjacket.

Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all! Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall: Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none: And some condemned for a fault alone.

I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.

Everyone asks if a man is rich, no one if he is good.

Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use.

I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

What a person does is what he IS, not what he says.