“What, what am I to do with all of this life?”

“I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”

“Surely--But I am very off from that.From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrowthat was my clean naivete and my faith.This morning, men deliver wounds and death.They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow.And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.”

“Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.”

“Poetry is life distilled.”

“When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story-- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday, And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday -- When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed, Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon Looking off down the long street To nowhere, Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why? And if-Monday-never-had-to-come— When you have forgotten that, I say, And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell, And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang; And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner, That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles Or chicken and rice And salad and rye bread and tea And chocolate chip cookies --I say, when you have forgotten that, When you have forgotten my little presentiment That the war would be over before they got to you; And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed, And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end Bright bedclothes, Then gently folded into each other— When you have, I say, forgotten all that, Then you may tell, Then I may believe You have forgotten me well.”

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.”