If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

In my beginning is my end.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

This love is silent.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

So the lover must struggle for words.

Home is where one starts from.

April is the cruellest month.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.