“When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.”

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

The best writing is rewriting.

Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.

Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

She said nothing, and Sir Andrew, too, was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.

The law is what it is-a majestic edifice, sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea.