Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

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