“To be a poet is to be taller, to be bigger
Than men! It is to bite as if you’re kissing!
It is to give alms, although you are a beggar like
King of the Realm where only pain is missing!It is to have a thousand desires for splendor
And do not even know what we want!
It is to have inside yourself a flaming star,
It is to have the condor’s mighty claw and wing!It is to be hungry, to be thirsty of Infinity!
By helmet, golden and satin mornings…
It is to condense the world into one lonely cry!And it is loving you, thus, hopelessly…
And it is you being soul, and blood, and life in me
And tell it singing to everyone!”

“Real misfortune is not just a matter of being hungry and thirsty; it is a matter of knowing that there are people who want you to be hungry and thirsty”

“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside”

“Wags are beggars in the realm of the intellect; they live on alms tossed to them by fortune—on flashes of wit.”

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake…”

“We (men) would rather lose an arm out a city bus window than tell you simply, “You’re not the
one.” We are quite sure you will kill us or yourself or both—or even worse, cry and yell at us.”

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”

“Although the stars do not speak, even in being silent they cry out.”

“There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.”

“It is also possible for a woman to go back to a man’s room, tell him she doesn’t want to have intercourse, mean it, start kissing, have intercourse, and then wish she hadn’t in the morning. How? Kissing is like eating potato chips. Before we know it, we’ve gone further than we said we would.”