Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Read at whim! Read at whim!
Habits are happiness of a sort...
The ways we miss our lives are life.
We can't tell our life from our wish
We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.
If wishes were stories, beggars would read.
A person is a process, one that leads to death.
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.
Doesn't the world need the painter's praise anymore?
We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.
To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Say what you like, but such things do happen - not often, but they do happen.
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
When you're young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
In the United States, there one feels free... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster.
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.
The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.
Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation.
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.
Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.