Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.