There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.