Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.

In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

As we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living.