To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.

In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.

Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.

Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.