Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight.

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

I refuse to be. In the madhouse of the inhuman I refuse to live. With the wolves of the market place I refuse to howl.

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

I am a shadow’s shade, a lunatic, perhaps, Of two dark moons.

In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.

I am a moonbeam, free to go whenever I choose.

The one that burned the hottest is the first to die.

What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a world where the deepest black is grey, and inspiration is kept in a thermos? with all this immensity in a measured world?

Think about me lightly, think of me, and forget.

I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.