In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Getting along with men isn't what's truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

Please to put a nickel, please to put a dime. How petitions trickle in at Christmas time!

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

Those wearing tolerance for a label call other views intolerable.

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved, like a hug from a child.

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing, peace is the measure.

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.

Marriage was all a woman's idea and for man's acceptance of the pretty yoke, it becomes us to be grateful.

Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.

A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.

Compromise if not the spice of life is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy.

Of the small gifts of heaven it seems to me a more than equal share. At birth was given. To girls with curly hair.

Ladies with curly hair. Have time to spare.

Of one thing I am certain the body is not the measure of healing peace is the measure.

To be a housewife is a difficult a wrenching sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed.

Praise is warming and desirable. But it is an earned thing. It has to be deserved like a hug from a child.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an a vocation. It becomes an obsession.

Suffering is as necessary to entertaining as vermouth is to a Martini - a small but vital ingredient.

It is the leisured, I have noticed, who rebel the most at an interruption of routine.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.