“I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.”

“I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.”

“That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

“But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing”

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.”

“There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

“FIRST YOGA LESSON “Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening slowly, no single energy tugging against another but peacefully, all together.” I couldn’t even touch my toes. “Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked. Well, something was certainly stretching. Standing impressively upright, she raised one leg and placed it against the other, then lifted her arms and shook her hands like leaves. “Be a tree,” she said. I lay on the floor, exhausted. But to be a lotus in the pond opening slowly, and very slowly rising— that I could do.”

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.”

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain - long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”

would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.”

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.”

“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.”

“How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?”

“Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.”

“You must never stop being whimsical.”

“LONELINESS I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Unconscious means identified totally with thought. You reduce reality to a conceptual reality.

What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.

The best way to convince someone is by making him realize that what you speak came from his own mind.

A person who thinks too much only ever thinks about his thoughts

On a day like today I am stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.