“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

“An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.”

“Another person's life, observed from the outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.”

“Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”

“A self-aware person, who knows his strengths and weaknesses, has more than enough confidence to achieve what he wants. Even so, he does not need recognition from others. When he reaches his goal, recognition will come naturally.”

“The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one!”

“I don't like to feel so crazy about someone," he said. "I don't like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.”

“The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration”

“The selfknowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life.”

“From one viewpoint there were (potentially) a multiplicity of Gleisters; but from another viewpoint there was only one, and he was that one. After all, it didn’t matter what these other people called themselves or where they came from; he was only the person he was here and now, the person whom he experienced. Reality is positional, ego is relational, and nature doesn’t deal in abstractions.”