"Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything."

"Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death."

"But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness."

"I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same."

"What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw."

"You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it."

"Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light."

"What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?"

"Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same."

"Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?"

"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

"Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"

"Here is where it -- you are alone in your head, you are all alone inside your brain. and that makes it impossible to believe that anything, everything and anyone that you own, love or hateis real. we will never know if we are living or dreaming."

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

"And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar."

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

"You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound."

"My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness"

"Erotica: the depiction of naked men. Depictions of naked women are far less innocent and are known as "pornography"."

"Relationship (definition): Liaison usually involving two people and their dirty dishes."

"Immoral (definition): Obsolete expression meaning "politically incorrect"."

"Right wing (definition): As with the left wing, half the propulsive force of a flightless bird."

"You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur, An irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr. Your nose is high-resolution while I live in a near-scentless fog You run at high speed, while I just have to slog (but it's a good ol' slog) So I just want to thank you for being my dog...."

"Butch (definition): Macho with a purse."

"The faith that education would destroy intolerance is false. It may be partly true, but people find that intolerance is fun."

"All that is required of us, in our "new sexual ethic," is that we have sex in a way that favours us more than it favours our diseases."

"Closet (definition): Basement suite of a heterosexual outhouse."

"Deviant (definition): A person who wanders from the One True Path and is caught urinating somewhere in the midst of the unthinkable. A person taking any exit ramp off the freeway of self-righteousness."

"Unnatural act (definition): Any everyday act not equally typical of cattle, sheep, and horses. Singing, smoking, and various heterosexual and homosexual acts are included."

"She makes me doubt my own sex."

"What a disgrace to live at the beginning of the 20th century. … One is always influenced by one's own time. And ours is that of Sarah Bernhardt and Rostand. Things will be much better in another ten years. You will see a new art born, new and beautiful. You will see that, but I shall not. I shall be dead. But … Sarah Bernhardt will live forever, and go on playing L'AIGLON forever!"

"Déesse à qui plaît la ruine des roses, Prolonge la nuit !"

"Just once in my life a man tried to embrace me. It was horrible! He had big boots, a heavy belt, huge gloves. Faugh! Oh, let's not talk about men."

"[Charles Brun] was so charming that I always write to him as "My dear Charlotte!""

"L’herbe de l’été pâlit sous le soleil. La rose, expirant sous les âpres ravages Des chaleurs, languit vers l’ombre, et le sommeil Coule des feuillages."

"I was born under an unlucky star. I love France and I am not French. I am English and I can't like England. My father was Scotch, my mother was born in Honolulu. My father, William Tarn, died at the age of forty in 1890. My real name is Pauline Tarn. I changed it to Renée Vivien."

"I'm not logical. I'm infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret, in a country boarding school in England from which I slipped away by climbing over the wall. I was fifteen, the same age as Juliet--a Juliet for whom Romeo had no attraction."

"Men smell of leather. … The leather of huntsmen, furniture movers, porters."

"With a wracking head and literally my whole body shaking as with ague I write this and tell you I have just this afternoon early finished Clavicembalisticum... The closing 4 pages are so cataclysmic and catastrophic as anything I've ever done — the harmony bites like nitric acid — the counterpoint grinds like the mills of God..."

"Visitors unwelcome."

"To the everlasting glory of those few men blessed and sanctified in the curses and execrations of those many whose praise is eternal damnation."

"Trying to be Sherlock Holmes is like trying to catch an arrow in mid-flight."