“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”

“For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.”

“The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.”

“Christ! What are patterns for?”

“You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow”

“You are ice and fire,The touch of you burns my hands like snow.You are cold and flame.You are the crimson of amaryllis,The silver of moon-touched magnolias.When I am with you,My heart is a frozen pondGleaming with agitated torches.”

“Taking us by and large, we're a queer lotWe women who write poetry. And when you thinkHow few of us there've been, it's queerer still.I wonder what it is that makes us do it,Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,The fragments of ourselves. Why are weAlready mother-creatures, double-bearing,With matrices in body and in brain?I rather think that there is just the reasonWe are so sparse a kind of human being;The strength of forty thousand AtlasesIs needed for our every-day concerns.There's Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.I know a single slender thing about her:That, loving, she was like a burning birch-treeAll tall and glittering fire, and that she wroteLike the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,Surprised her reticences by flinging mineInto the wind. This tossing off of garmentsWhich cloud the soul is none too easy doingWith us to-day. But still I think with SaphoOne might accomplish it, were she in the moodto bare her loveliness of words and tellThe reasons, as she possibly conceived themof why they are so lovely. Just to knowHow she came at them, just watchThe crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair,And listen, thinking all the while 'twas sheWho spoke and that we two were sistersOf a strange, isolated little family.And she is Sapho -- Sapho -- not Miss or Mrs.,A leaping fire we call so for convenience....”