I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.

Every great change is simple.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.