The only achievement I am really proud of is the friends I have made in this community.
Healthy people are invalids who don't know it.
History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.
People who feel well are sick people neglecting themselves.
The world is an enormous injustice.
There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding.
When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.
The purpose of life is to be beautiful, to be bountiful, to be blissful, to be graceful and grateful. What a wonderful English word-grateful. If one is great and full, one is God. And whenever smallness faces you, you should be great, and full-full of that greatness.
To bring a child into the world that you cannot feed, clothe, house, and educate is the moral equivalent, in my opinion, of a drive-by shooting.
Truth telling is the first building block of character -- a quality that seems to be getting rarer and rarer in all-forgiving America.