Life is a picnic on a precipice.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite accurate. In a poem, as distinct from many other kinds of verbal societies, meaning and being are identical. A poem might be called a pseudo-person. Like a person, it is unique and addresses the reader personally. On the other hand, like a natural being and unlike a historical person, it cannot lie.

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!