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

a poet never feels useful.

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

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.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.