“Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.”

“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”

“Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself.”

“Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.”

“That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts…”

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

“Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the Thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory.”

“If you have a choice of selling shoes to ladies or giving birth to a flaming porcupine… look into that second, less painful career.”

“The birth of the mind is the death of the senses”

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”