“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, wh...”

“He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.”

“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful a...”

“and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.”

“He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, m...”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

“He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.”

“I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.”

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of em...”

“Im not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. Ive seen a chunk of the universe, true, but theres still so much more to see. I doubt Ill ever cure t...”

“My hope, my heaven, my trust must be,My gentle guide, in following thee.”

“Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmonious...”

“Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.”

“Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to ...”

“They say that it is always poets that die in wars, and I never got over a sense of being in the trenches.”