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

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.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

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 you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.

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