Great Throughts Treasury

"Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves."

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."

"Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art."

"Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above. Desolation angels, served it up with love."

"Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know."

"Words are just rules and regulations to me."

"Writing is not some quiet, closet act."

"Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up."

"You can't carve up the world. It's not a pie."

"You can't, he said. It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."

"Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go."