“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

“O dear white children casual as birds,Playing among the ruined languages,So small beside their large confusing words,So gay against the greater silencesOf dreadful things you did…”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“(Precocious children rarely grow up good). My aunts and uncles thought me quite atrocious. For using words more adult than I should”

“Oh dear white children, casual as birds,Playing among the ruined languages,So small beside their large confusing words.”

“Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.”

“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods.But if the seed of a genuine disinterested love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more developed than it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those who hate him for the same reason.Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he will take this as an expression of personal affection – the thought that you might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience is exhausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how little you love others.”