Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption.