I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

I will go down with my colours flying.

One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.