The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.

Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

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