He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.
Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter’s waking thoughts.
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.
I will love you forever” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. “I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday” – Is that still as easy?
O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.
Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.
Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.
The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;
Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, ‘I know what I like,’ he is really saying ‘I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark,And the living nations wait,Each sequestered in its hate;Intellectual disgraceStares from every human face,And the seas of pity lieLocked and frozen in each eye.
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.
Always the following wind of historyOf others’ wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.
To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ….
The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.
And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.
In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
I have never, I think, wanted to ‘belong’ to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way and let me go mine.
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.