The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

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

Redheaded women buck like goats.

What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.