The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

Everything seems an echo of something else.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.