Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.

You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.