“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

“One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”

“That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.”

“In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water,And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

“Slowly we are learning,We at least know this much,That we have to unlearnMuch that we were taught,And are growing charyOf emphatic dogmas;Love like Matter is muchOdder than we thought.”

“The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wrote About DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have;Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.”

“As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.”