We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.