Mrs. Robbins asked: “If I am not for myself, who then is for me?” — and she was for herself so passionately that the other people in the world decide… - Randall Jarrell

The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.” (Or deplore them.)

What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention — the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on — is as much of a signature as anything in it.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.