But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

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.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).