“My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....”

“Then, completely unbidden, a series of images flashed through my mind. Roger drumming on the steering wheel. Roger sleeping next to me in bed, the blanket falling of his shoulder. Watching me carefully as we drove through a rain-soaked Kansas night, asking me to talk to him. Offering me the last french fry.”

“The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.”

“The gift was not large as money goes, and my need was not great, but the spirit of the gift is beyond price and leaves me blessed and in debt.”

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

“When they see beyond the sky,When they know beyond the mind,When they hear the song of the Burning Light;Take these Gifts of My Outstretched Hand,Weave them together.I shall come.”