Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 13

To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

In human eyes, even in lithographic ones, there’s something terrible: the inevitable warning of consciousness, the silent shout that there’s a soul there.

The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves.

Perhaps one day, towards the end of the future, someone will write a poem about me, and I’ll begin to reign in my Kingdom.

In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization.

And I who am saying all this – why am I writing this book? Because I realize it’s imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that’s why I’m writing it.

All I asked of life is that it ask nothing of me.

Ах, неправда, что жизнь горестна или что горестно думать о ней. Правда в том, что наша боль только тогда серьёзна и велика, когда мы выдумываем её такою. Если мы естественны, она уйдёт, как пришла, утихая так же, как возросла. Всё есть ничто, и наша боль — его часть.