What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.