Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation; I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.