It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

The tags’ chain stirs with the wind; and I sleepPaid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own lifeLoses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.

The blind date that has stood you up: your life.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare...

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.

It’s ugly, but is it art?

In the United States, there one feels free… Except from the Americans – but every pearl has its oyster.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

When I was young and miserable and prettyAnd poor, I’d wishWhat all girls wish: to have a husband,A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wishIs womanish:That the boy putting groceries in my carSee...

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren’t like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

The cat’s asleep; I whisper “kitten”Till he stirs a little and begins to purr–He doesn’t wake. Today out on the limb(The limb he thinks he can’t climb down from)He mewed until I heard him in...

He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a...

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she...

All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.

I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it...

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.