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

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...

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it...

Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.

Drama is based on the Mistake.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor...

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely...

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but...

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

He is the Way.Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.He is the Truth.Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;You will come to a great city that has...

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could...

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ….

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter’s waking thoughts.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

I have never, I think, wanted to ‘belong’ to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should...

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and,...

Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.

Funeral BluesStop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on...

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn’t know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I...