Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.

Culture means control over nature.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?