“In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.”

“My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.”

“It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely did it posses her whenever they were alone.”

“If we leave that general descriptive talk where everything which looks like a poem can be called a poem and turn instead to normative talk, we will of course not recognize as a poem everything that looks like a poem. A real poem has to be a successful poem, a successful speech act. In approximately the same way that only a mathematical proof which really proves something can be called a mathematical proof. It is not enough that it looks like a proof. The proof has to prove. For the poem it is not enough to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.”

“And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.”

“His body came home, but his soul had been devoured in the firefight of a godless desert.”