“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”

“A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.”

“But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.”

“Poetry is like time travel, and poems take us to the heart of the matter”

“For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.”

“In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.”

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”

“It's like going back to being a child again. Someone to bathe you. Someone to lift you. Someone to wipe you. We all know how to be a child. It's inside all of us. For me, It's just remembering how to enjoy it.”