The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.

Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.