The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ (1923)
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1947) ‘It Must Be Abstract’ no. 1
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises...
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm.
‘Of Mere Being’ (1957)
We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind.
‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (1950) no. 9
A more severe,
More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,
As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds,the longed-for lands.
‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (1950) no. 28
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.
‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ (1923) pt. 1
Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.