Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among it’s desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes...

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, ‘I know what I like,’ he is really saying ‘I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my...

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to...

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private...

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this...

A child’s reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different...

Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;

We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a...

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there’s a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that’s genuinely goodFrom one...

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two:...

All I have is a voice.

I will love you forever” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. “I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday” – Is that still as easy?

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in...

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or...

I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to...

If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good — we are all here on earth to help others:...

He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun,...

All we are not stares back at what we are.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer....

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should...

In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision...

My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven at one a.m.To love you till I die?Earth meets too many crimesFor fibs to interest her;If I...

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

A.E.Housman’No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation):Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation.Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;Food...