Emotions and Feelings

[ Responding to the question of whether he was available to run for vice-president :] I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.

I have always been fond of the West African proverb: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who “hits the line hard.”

[ Referring to his dog :] Fala’s Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

This intimate alliance—which for me makes the true man—of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will.

It’s been so long since I made love I can’t even remember who gets tied up.

Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue .

Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

Rire est le propre de l’homme .

The appetite grows by eating.