Why has our poetry eschewed The rapture and response of food? What hymns are sung, what praises said For home-made miracles of bread?

Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse?a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance.

Life, alas, is very drear. Up with the glass! Down with the beer!

God, though this life is but a wraith, Although we know not what we use, Although we grope with little faith, Give me the heart to fight and lose.

Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.

Write out of love, write out of instinct, write out of reason. But always for money.

Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.

Nothing but blackness above And nothing that moves but the cars... God, if you wish for our love, Fling us a handful of stars!

Come, drink the mystic wine of Night, Brimming with silence and the stars; While earth, bathed in this holy light, Is seen without its scars.

Laughter shall drown the raucous shout; And, though these shelt'ring walls are thin, May they be strong to keep hate out And hold love in.

From compromise and things half done, Keep me with stern and stubborn pride; And when at last the fight is won, God, keep me still unsatisfied.

I observe and remain silent.

It's frustrating to witness how popular Fairtrade bananas, coffee and tea have become with shoppers and supermarkets while plenty of unfair trade goes on, largely unnoticed, in our own back yard.

But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's.

He who loses wealth loses much he who loses a friend loses more but he that loses his courage loses all.

When a soldier of the night's watch dies they say, "And now his watch is over." That's what they say when a comedian dies. They go, "And now his tour is done."

You want sweet dreams, lose the attitude and you might find I'll give you reason to have them.

In Fall Out Boy, I noticed that I wasn't putting all that much soul into it. It was just kind of screaming, I guess. I was just dying to get out of there!

Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

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