Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.
We are all born; some remain so.
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.
The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Light black. From pole to pole.
I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant
You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.
That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.
It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.
Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.
Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.
The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.
When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.
I gave up before birth.
Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.
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