“Nothing is more useful than to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek elsewhere...for the solace to its troubles.”

“If you seek happiness, look in the mirror. If you seek love, look elsewhere.”

“What this world needs is truth, not consolation. It must find itself in its ordeal and by way of its restlessness, not in the solace of edifying discourses that do nothing but pile on more testimony to its misery.”

“For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.”

“The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them.”

“The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted...everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.”