All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars.

To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.

I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good.

We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.