“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.”

“I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”

“I am declinedInto the vale of years.”

“What should we speak of When we are old as you? when we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December? how, In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?”

“My way of lifeIs fall'n into the sear and yellow leaf.”

“A little integrity is better than any career.”

“Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it.”

“At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun 'at work' and getting paid for it!”

“Tut, man, one fire burns out another's burning; One pain is less'ned by another's anguish; Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning; One desperate grief cures with another's languish.”

“Patch grief with proverbs.”

“Because I cannot sleep I make music at night.”

“When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”

“Earth's a howling wilderness,Truculent with fraud and force.”

“The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?”

“You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life.”

“Come, Lady, die to live.”

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.”

“But when the fox hath once got in his nose, He'll soon find means to make the body follow.”

“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”

“Affection faints not like a pale-faced coward, But then woos best when most his choice is froward.”

“Now, my masters, happy man be his dole, say I; every man to his business.”

“But earthlier happy is the rose distill'dThan that which withering on the virgin thornGrows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.”

“What e'er thou art, act well thy part.”