You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Thinking is my fighting.
I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.
Use words that soak up life.
There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.
But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.
Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
I prefer men to cauliflowers.
But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.
I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.