I've been born, and once is enough.

It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards?

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.