“In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.”

“How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.”

“He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.”

“Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.”

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”

“But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better”

“My love will comewill fling open her arms and fold me in them,will understand my fears, observe my changes.In from the pouring dark, from the pitch nightwithout stopping to bang the taxi doorshe’ll run upstairs through the decaying porchburning with love and love’s happiness,she’ll run dripping upstairs, she won’t knock,will take my head in her hands,and when she drops her overcoat on a chair,it will slide to the floor in a blue heap.”