I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

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

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.

I do esteem individual liberty above everything.

It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.