What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.

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.

Feelings will get you out of control, but faith doesn't.

Hopeless situations are never hopeless to God.

Success means nothing if you don't know who you are. If you don't know who you are then you are not a success.

Simple things have greater power than the complicated things!

Since my mother is an extremely devoted Christian Orthodox woman, she prayed a great deal and taught me how to pray.

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

There is nothing permanent in the world except change.

I think the United States is still the indispensable force for positive change and for rule of law and for order and structure.

My dad was a musician, and that was his first love, and I think probably, to be really honest, it was my first love as well.

Minutes, hours, days, months, and years, Pass'd over to the end they were created, Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. Ah, what a life were this!