"The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation... they do not want to attract attention."

"I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art."

"I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent."

"Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad — we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress — at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned."

"Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?"

"Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since."

"I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... But I am too busy thinking about myself."

"I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy."

"My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life."

"As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten."

"The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" — a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world."