That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

Things are not what they seem.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.