It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
