“I don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks”

“I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.”

“I wasn’t readyFor you.I understood nothingSeemingly except my feelingsYou were whirling In your lifeI was keepingEverything in my head"To Marina”

“I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.”

“When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!”

“I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years / Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window / Through which he saw her head, connecting with / Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red /Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years; / For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not /Inside a bottle, thank goodness! ----- from "To You”

“Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them,Idea and friendship.”