“Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.”

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”

“Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.”

“Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.”

“When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.”

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

“and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,and I grew, I grew,I wore rubies and bought tomatoesand now, in my middle age,about nineteen in the head I'd say,I am rowing, I am rowingthough the oarlocks stick and are rustyand the sea blinks and rollslike a worried eyebal,but I am rowing, I am rowing,though the wind pushes me backand I know that that island will not be perfect,it will have the flaws of life,the absurdities of the dinner table,but there will be a doorand I will open itand I will get rid of the rat insdie me,the gnawing pestilential rat.God will take it with his two handsand embrace it”