There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.

Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.