The nurse is the night To wake to, to die in: and the day I live, The world and its life are her dreams. - Randall Jarrell

Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.

Everybody must have wished at some time that poetry were written by nice ordinary people instead of poets — and, in a better world, it may be; but in this world writers like Constance Carrier are the well oysters that don’t have the pearls.

...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it...