“It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
{Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal}”
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{Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal}”
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“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
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“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
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“Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.”
― Studies in Classic American Literature
― Studies in Classic American Literature
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