Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.
With a poem you can say ‘I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.’
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.
You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.
It’s harder to confess the sin that no one believes in Than the crime that everyone can appreciate. For the crime is in relation to the law And the sin is in relation to the sinner.
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.
I was too slow a mover to be a boxer. It was much easier to be a poet.
I am no prophet-and here’s no great matter.
Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity.
Whatever you do, don’t whimper, but take the consequences.
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.