Pain Comes From The Darkness. And We

Christina Stead Has A Chinese Say, "our Old Age Is Perhaps Life's Decision About Us" Or, Worse, The Decision We Have Made About Ourselves Without Ever Realizing We Were Making It.

Most Of The People In A War Never Fight For Even A Minute Though They Bear For Years And Die Forever. They Do Not Fight, But Only Starve, Only Suffer, Only Die: The Sum Of All This Passive Misery Is That Great Activity, War.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

If Poetry Were Nothing But Texture, [dylan] Thomas Would Be As Good As Any Poet Alive. The What Of His Poems Is Hardly Essential To Their Success, And The Best And Most Brilliantly Written Pieces Usually Say Less Than The Worst.

Our Quarrels With The World Are Like Our Quarrels With God: No Matter How Right We Are, We Are Wrong.