The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have; Not universal love But to be loved alone.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.