“the world is no fit place for human beings. we harm and ache.”

“Humanness is a window thrown against a wall.”

“The world has a body and I have none”

“I have seen a sparrow becoming the world's end”

“The poetry of attention is not metaphysical. It trusts the opened eye to see. By faith, the eye stays open. And so the work of poetry is trust that, by faith, is shown to be no work at all.”

“As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment.”

“In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.”