"Give me a sheet of paper & I can’t help filling it in. The result—more often than not—is good & bad, serious & comic, sincere & insincere, lucid or nonsensical by the turns of my whirligig mentality, started from the wrong end, a mentality that ran before it walked, & perhaps will never walk, that wanted to fly before it had the right even to think of wings."

"What's never known is safest in this life. Under the skysigns they who have no arms have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best."

"Land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it!"

"Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms"

"It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now."

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sunlight And the legends of the green chapels."

"After the first death, there is no other."

"They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion."

"When all my five and country senses see, The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye, Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac, Love in the frost is pared and wintered by."

"The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country; These five kings did a king to death."

"Light breaks on secret lots, On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain; When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts."

"Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears."

"Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones."