...“progress”, in poetry at least, comes not so much from digesting the last age as from rejecting it altogether (or, rather, from eating a little an… - Randall Jarrell

Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.