“Sing 'Hey to you — good-day to you' —Sing 'Bah to you — ha! ha! to you' —Sing 'Booh to you — pooh, pooh to you' —And that's what you should say!”

“I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.”

“Gilbert's response to being told they (the words 'ruddy' and 'bloody') meant the same thing was: "Not at all, for that would mean that if I said that I admired your ruddy countenance, which I do, I would be saying that I liked your bloody cheek, which I don't.”

“What do you say, Pooh?"Pooh opened his eyes with a jerk and said, "Extremely.""Extremely what?" asked Rabbit."What you were saying," said Pooh. "Undoubtably.”

“I had hardly begun to readI asked how can you ever be surethat what you write is reallyany good at all and he said you can'tyou can't you can never be sureyou die without knowingwhether anything you wrote was any goodif you have to be sure don't write”

“We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain -- that's the beginning of language.Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will.I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it.”

“To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dockin a pestilential prison with a life-long lockawaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shockfrom a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.”