The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?
All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.
A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.
Hate does not present many choices; if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole.
The measured blood beats out the year’s delay.
What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.
It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.
At midnight tears Run into your ears.
No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
Women have no wilderness in them They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.
I’ll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.
I don’t like quintessential certitude.
Once form has been smashed, it has been smashed for good, and once a forbidden subject has been released, it has been released for good.
O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.
The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.
I have lost faith in universal panaceas – work is the one thing in which I really believe.