"Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence."

"I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."

"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself."

"A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into the donkey that finally found itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes."

"Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people."

"War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized."

"He fights and he writes. Is there something I have missed? He is a smiling pugilist."

"I have learned more from Ezra Pound about writing than from anyone else."

"Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination"

"There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry."

"I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music."

"I look upon verse as an exercise in composition."

"Whatever it is.. poem.. play, story..it must hold attention."

"Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery."

"One may be pardoned, yes I know one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)"

"Blessed the man whose faith is different from possessiveness - of a kind not framed by 'things which do appear' ( Hebrews 11:3)"

"There is hate's crown beneath which all is death; there's love without which none is king."

"There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I conquered in myself what causes war"

"In Homer, existence is flawed; transcendence, conditional; ' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual',"

"Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me from egocentricity and its propensity to bisect, mis-state, misunderstand and obliterate continuity?"

"O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven — of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"

"You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

"Consume hostility; employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity! Insurgent feet shall not outrun multiplied flames, O Sun."

"Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle, Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine."

"If you demand on the other hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry."

"'Hebrew poetry is, prose with a sort of heightened consciousness' Ecstasy affords the occasion expediency, determines the form"

"that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder."

"My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits.""

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador — the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity."

"So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ..."

"He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco brimming with inner light — that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot."

"We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave."

"What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save."

"Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister."

"A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague."

"Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal — the symbol of medicine."

"The problems is mastered — insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut."

"Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, "Farewell, good sense.""

"We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained."

"Marianne Moore is fundamental, and not only for having published poets of great intensity, such as Hart Crane, in the Dial, her splendid poetry review. It is difficult to define her contribution, so decisive it appears to me, but I am certain that she is our most original poetess, the one who has brought a brilliant precision to poetic language by means of a meticulous conservatism. Her extremely personalized style is at this moment influencing the young poets of the United States. She has succeeded in introducing a great variety of poetic motives, maintaining the ancestral, 'out-of-date' virtues of American culture-such as irony, a subtle sense of humor, understatement-while keeping herself at the same time within the creative vanguard of poetry in the English language."

"Although Le Guin tended to discount the distinction between dream-world and "real" world, she made a sharp distinction between the real world and the world of science fiction. When asked if there is really a difference between what we call reality and science fiction, she retorted decisively: "You bet you there is. You keep that firmly in mind. It's a fiction. You know what Marianne Moore said about imaginary gardens with real toads-sometimes there are real gardens with imaginary toads in them. But it's a mixture. Fiction writers write fiction, particularly in science fiction. People forget this and say they are describing reality or they are predicting reality. But the very most that a fiction writer can do is offer an option.""

"I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do."

"Until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems."