Hate does not present many choices; if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.