To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."

"Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls."

"Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. . . . Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world."