He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.

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A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

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Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

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I am not the we of anyone.

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Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

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Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

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His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

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Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

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Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.

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Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

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