A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
The ways we miss our lives are life.
Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.
most of the people in a war never fight for even a minute though they bear for years and die forever. They do not fight, but only starve, only suffer, only die: the sum of all this passive misery is that great activity, War.
there is in this world no line so bad that someone won't someday copy it.
Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.
The dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.
We are all so to speak intellectuals about something.
You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.
We can't tell our life from our wish
The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
If you've been put in your place long enough you begin to act like the place.
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
Read at whim! Read at whim!
Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.
Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.
I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)
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