One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.

All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves. This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth, for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live on beyond themselves.

I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.