What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.