People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.

Something you have to make...It's all work, work.

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.

An old mans memories, like his bones, grow sharp with age and show their true shapes.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.