“In 1914... [German] history, poetry, dream and the individual moment were all combined in one exhilarating sensation...The nation was a creation of one's imagination, a poetic truth, an ethical, not a social, construct... blind obedience was the true value... the stronger a person is... the more he obeys.”

“One tiny Hobbit against all the evil the world could muster. A sane being would have given up, but Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle, to find Frodo, destroy the Ring, and cleanse Middle Earth of its festering malignancy. He knew he would try again. Fail, perhaps. And try once more. A thousand, thousand times if need be, but he would not give up the quest.”

“. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.”

“George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with”

“Reality withing the depths of night has no more substance than the lucid dream.”

“To make great art, one first must become insane and desperate.”

“The acute scenes were still on our eyes, immediate and clear in the passion; and there were moments, too, in which we were outsiders and could draw away, as if we were in a plane and rose far, to a high focus above that coast, those cities, and this sea, with sight and feelings sharper than before”