It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.