Literature and Words

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

How wonderful is Death,

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Ere Babylon was dust,

Most wretched men

The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max.

The play-bill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

All violent feelings … produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory … In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.

Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français.

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,

… Je me suis baigné dans le Poème

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Literature is news that STAYS news.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

And even I can remember

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.