“Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?”

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, ‘Look at it, listen to it.’ Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That’s not poetry’s purpose.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

An horrible stillness first invades our ear, And in that silence we the tempest fear.

Some temptations cannot be fought. One must close one’s mind and fly from them

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

Temptation exercises our faith and teaches us to pray.

But the prize for courage will surely be awarded most justly to those who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger.

Most of the temptations that come to us to sell the soul come in connection with the getting of money.

Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.

Find out what your temptations are, and you will find out largely what you are yourself.