We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.