A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit.

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.