“To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.”

“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.”

“And the time sundials tellMay be minutes and hours. But it may just as wellBe seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours.Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files(They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go:Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you growThat whatever there is in a garden, the sunCounts up on its dial. By the time it is doneOur sundial—or someone's— will certainly addAll the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.And if anyone's here for the finish, the sunWill have told him—by sundial—how well we have done.How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.”

“One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watchWith Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby starsMounted on spheres and the Primum MobileCoiled and gleaming to the end of spaceAnd the notched spheres eating each other's rindsTo the last tooth of time, and the case closed.”

“The public library is the most dangerous place in town”

“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.”

“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. ”