“Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.”

“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.”

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

“If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere, From being No one up to being Someone, Be sure to keep repeating to yourself You owe it to an arbitrary god Whose mercy to you rather than to others Won’t bear to critical examination. Stay unassuming. If for lack of license To wear the uniform of who you are, You should be tempted to make up for it In a subordinationg look or toe, Beware of coming too much to the surface And using for apparel hat was meant To be the curtain of the inmost soul.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.”