And the end and the beginning were always there, before the beginning and after the end.
He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.
Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.
If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.
My mind may be American but my heart is British.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
If we all were judged according to the consequences Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention And beyond our limited understanding Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.
To country people Cows are mild, And flee from any stick they throw; But I’m a timid town bred child, And all the cattle seem to know.
There’s no vocabulary For love within a family, love that’s lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.
Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question.