Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.