The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.