Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

Redheaded women buck like goats.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.