“Once (Roethke) said to me, that nervous undergrad who wanted the love of the world to roar out every time he put a word down, ‘Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.’ He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure. What endures are your feelings about your work. You wouldn’t trade your poems from anybody’s. To do that you would also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy. One of those per lifetime is enough.”
-Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town (quickly becoming my favorite paperback professor)
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