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Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
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The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
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Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
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It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
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Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
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A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.
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As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
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Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
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Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
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I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
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We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
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I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
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The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
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Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
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As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.