Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.
Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.