The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness - that darkness flung me - Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

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.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.