Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
It's just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a substance burning close to the body as possible without risk of immolation.
the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
When a woman like that whom I've seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.
When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.
I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.
I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left free.
I hate not managing to speak clearly. I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia - like I'm locked in my own head - if what I've said hasn't reached someone.
It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop.
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
