It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.