We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.
Intense love always leads to mourning.
What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.
Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain.
That's why I'm not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
I caution you as I was never cautioned: You will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth-- Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you. It will not keep you alive.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.
I pretended indifference…even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.
At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change.
I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness—
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
The love of form is a love of endings.
The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.
