A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.