Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us.

There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.

The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.