Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At all events there is in Brooklyn something that makes me feel at home.
You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.
A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people.
Honesty - however dangerous - should be as valuable as radium it seems to me.
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.
The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled shoes! Denmark's sanctuaried Jews!
Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.
I never 'plan' a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.
Psychology, which explains everything, Explains nothing, And we are still in doubt.
Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.
If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.
What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Unconfusion submits its confusion to proof; it's not a Herod's oath that cannot change.
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.
The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim.
We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.
Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.
Wolf's wool is the best of wool, / but it cannot be sheared because / the wolf will not comply.
Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.
Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise
There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.
Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?
Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.
If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.
The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan.
The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.
Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.
O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles"- unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness.
My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."
The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.
Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.