We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.

The cliche is dead poetry.

As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.