A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.