I am not very hopeful about the Earth remaining as it was when I was a child. It's already greatly changed. But I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we're animals, that we need the Earth. And that can be devastating.

All night

the dark buds of dreams

open

richly.

In the center

of every petal

is a letter,

and you imagine

if you could only remember

and string them all together

they would spell the answer.

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.... 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.

There is nothing better than work. Work is also play, children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty. But I feel writing is work, and I feel it's also play - bound together.

I didn't know I was a recluse. I mean, I know many people in Provincetown—fishermen, Portuguese people, young people. If the plumber says, "How's your work goin'?" I'm very easy with that. But if somebody I don't know comes to town and calls me up and says, "I love your work. I'm here for three days, could I take you to lunch?"—well, that is something I can't do. It's hard to meet a stranger—you give of yourself—and if I did that, I'd want to do it well. I'd have to leave my desk, or the woods, and I don't want to.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

I know several lives worth living,

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning—it'll be gone.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

I know

death is the fascinating snake

under the leaves, sliding

and sliding; I know

the heart loves him too, can't

turn away, can't

break the spell. Everything

wants to enter the slow thickness,

aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.

Wants to be stone.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

I used up a lot of pencils.

Nobody, of course, is kind

or mean

for a simple reason.

Life is much the same

when it's going well--

resonant

and unremarkable.

But who,

not under disaster's seal,

can understand what life is like

when it begins to crumble?

So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.