Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.