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.

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.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

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.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.

Life will always get in the way of living.

Readers are the glue that binds the books together.

"Now" is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream.

To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

People who achieve a sense of meaning in their lives are happier than those who live from one pleasure to another.

The maid screamed. The Queen gasped. Sophie waved.