A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.

One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.

Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.

There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned