“Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted”

“BAD PEOPLEA man told me once that all the bad peopleWere needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernailsYou need; they are really claws, and we knowClaws. The sharks—what about them?They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced menIn black coats who chase you for hoursIn dreams—that’s the only way to get youTo the shore. Sometimes those hard womenWho abandon you get you to say, “You.”A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takesA lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.Then they blow across three or four States.This man told me that things work together.Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;And a careless god—who refuses to let peopleEat from the Tree of Knowledge—can leadTo books, and eventually to us. We writePoems with lies in them, but they help a little.”

“What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.”

“like a note of music, you are about to become nothing”

“We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.”

“horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live -- they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley”

“They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it. (On being named Minnesota's first Poet Laureate)”