In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.

I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.