“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.”

“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.”

“Back out of all this now too much for us,Back in a time made simple by the lossOf detail, burned, dissolved, and broken offLike graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,There is a house that is no more a houseUpon a farm that is no more a farmAnd in a town that is no more a town.The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct youWho only has at heart your getting lost,May seem as if it should have been a quarry—Great monolithic knees the former townLong since gave up pretense of keeping covered.And there’s a story in a book about it:Besides the wear of iron wagon wheelsThe ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,The chisel work of an enormous GlacierThat braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.You must not mind a certain coolness from himStill said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.Nor need you mind the serial ordealOf being watched from forty cellar holesAs if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.As for the woods’ excitement over youThat sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,Charge that to upstart inexperience.Where were they all not twenty years ago?They think too much of having shaded outA few old pecker-fretted apple trees.Make yourself up a cheering song of howSomeone’s road home from work this once was,Who may be just ahead of you on footOr creaking with a buggy load of grain.The height of the adventure is the heightOf country where two village cultures fadedInto each other. Both of them are lost.And if you’re lost enough to find yourselfBy now, pull in your ladder road behind youAnd put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.Then make yourself at home. The only fieldNow left’s no bigger than a harness gall.First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,The playthings in the playhouse of the children.Weep for what little things could make them glad.Then for the house that is no more a house,But only a belilaced cellar hole,Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.Your destination and your destiny’sA brook that was the water of the house,Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,Too lofty and original to rage.(We know the valley streams that when arousedWill leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)I have kept hidden in the instep archOf an old cedar at the watersideA broken drinking goblet like the GrailUnder a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)Here are your waters and your watering place.Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”

“You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.”

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

“The Master Speed No speed of wind or water rushing bybut you have speed far greater. You can climbback up a stream of radiance to the sky,and back through history up the stream of time.And you were given this swiftness, not for hastenor chiefly that you may go where you will,but in the rush of everything to waste,that you may have the power of standing still--off any still or moving thing you say.Two such as you with such a master speedFrom one another once you are agreedthat life is only life forevermoretogether wing to wing and oar to oar.”