What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.