We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.