I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.

Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

I want God, not my idea of God.