“Christ! What are patterns for?”

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”

“Taking us by and large, we're a queer lotWe women who write poetry. And when you thinkHow few of us there've been, it's queerer still.I wonder what it is that makes us do it,Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,The fragments of ourselves. Why are weAlready mother-creatures, double-bearing,With matrices in body and in brain?I rather think that there is just the reasonWe are so sparse a kind of human being;The strength of forty thousand AtlasesIs needed for our every-day concerns.There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.I know a single slender thing about her:That, loving, she was like a burning birch-treeAll tall and glittering fire, and that she wroteLike the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,Surprised her reticences by flinging mineInto the wind. This tossing off of garmentsWhich cloud the soul is none too easy doingWith us to-day. But still I think with SaphoOne might accomplish it, were she in the moodto bare her loveliness of words and tellThe reasons, as she possibly conceived themof why they are so lovely. Just to knowHow she came at them, just watchThe crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair,And listen, thinking all the while 'twas sheWho spoke and that we two were sistersOf a strange, isolated little family.And she is Sapho -- Sapho -- not Miss or Mrs.,A leaping fire we call so for convenience....”

“You are ice and fire,The touch of you burns my hands like snow.You are cold and flame.You are the crimson of amaryllis,The silver of moon-touched magnolias.When I am with you,My heart is a frozen pondGleaming with agitated torches.”

“All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words. ”

“You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow”

“Even Pain pricks to livelier living.”