“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

“I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.”

“I tell you thisto break your heart,by which I mean onlythat it break open and never close againto the rest of the world.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.”

“And there you are on the shore,fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the liliesare slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepestspurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.”

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”