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.

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...