Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
Democracy in the contemporary world demands, among other things, an educated and informed people.
I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?
Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.
What childishness is it that while there’s breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?
Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.
Someone loves us all.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
I’ve never written the things I’d like to write that I’ve admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?
Something needn’t be large to be good.