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I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
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Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
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A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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’Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ’is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
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When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
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It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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’Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ’is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.