Time

Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

I wonder if you realize how much of my life I've spent loving you.

Winter seclusion - listening, that evening, to the rain in the mountain.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

In the cicada's cry, no sign can foretell how soon it must die.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

What is a ruin if not an original image, an original form?

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

The entire drama of human life is summarized and concentrated in the delicate pattern of a high lace collar.

As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

A sense of history and a sense of the permanence of language are the ballast any poet needs.

It is time that we had our own images.

I want to go in. I never want to finish. I quote myself as saying to a friend: But I never want to finish.

The book exists simultaneously in two places and two times.