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

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

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

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.

Lines are very difficult to learn.

We decided to redefine the bottom line at Ben & Jerry’s

You won’t even know you’ve crossed the line until it’s way back in your rearview mirror.

While Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines…

Somewhere along the line common sense should prevail,.

Wisdom, Happiness, and Courage are not waiting somewhere out beyond sight at the end of a straight line; they’re part of a continuous cycle that begins right here. They’re not only the ending, but the beginning as well.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

The bottom line is this: Miers is a disappointing pick.