1. “All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.”
2. “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
3. “Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.”
4. "He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression] to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen."
5. "I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe."
6. “It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”
7. "Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."
8. “Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
9. "No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."
10. “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”
11. “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”
12. “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”
13. “The last word in stolentelling!”
14. “The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.”
15. “The now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
16. "The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric."
17. “This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By epiphany -- a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that the themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
18. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to create life out of life.”
19. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
20. ”Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?”
21. "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."
22. “You are my only love.You have me completely in your power.I know and feel that if I am to write anything fine and noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart.I would like to go through life side by side with you, telling you more and more until we grew to be one being together until the hour should come for us to die.”
