Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I want God, not my idea of God.

We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.