It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.
There is a charm in making a stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will survive the competition in the mixture.
As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.
A prophet is always much wider than his followers, much more liberal than those who label themselves with his name.
The worlds in which man is evolving as he treads the circle of births and deaths are three: the physical world, the astral or intermediate world, the mental or heavenly world.
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.
And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.
It is good to dress in fair clothes to dine with friends. It honors your host, if you are a guest; and your guest if you are a host. And both adorn the feast, and so celebrate the gifts of the world.
¿La risa? ¡Qué cosa extraña! Es un temblor alegre que corre por dentro, como las ardillas por un árbol hueco. Pero luego restalla en la cintura, y hace aflojar las rodillas…
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.
If you let people break your spirit and detour you from your path, then you have not been true to yourself or those you're here to touch, those who believe in you.
If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
It's just me throwing myself at you, romance as usual, us times us, not lust but moxibustion, a substance burning close to the body as possible without risk of immolation.
the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
When a woman like that whom I've seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
