Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

America is a lunatic asylum.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

What thou lovest well remains.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.