For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.