“If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.”

“Ugliness in poetry they may find clever and interesting. But it is only beauty that "snatches the breath and fills the eyes with tears."”

“We must never shed tears
That is the life form’s defeat and if we give into the emotions then it only becomes proof of our inability to control it.”

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

“We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.”

“We cannot tear a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.”

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

“When a woman appears to express fear, we cannot assure her without at least releasing her from responsibility; when we interpret the same emotion in a man as anger, we want to blame him and be certain he acknowledges responsibility. We want to find her guiltless; we want to find him guilty.”

“I come to make song, after the tears.
And even if a choir of men
sprayed my tongue with silence,
poetry will come, with liberating voice,
to make my song fall from the trees
and reach the most deeply buried abysses of those tears
that the child lent me when crying himself into life.Because my infant song
is stronger than man’s tears,
and it could even conquer me
robbing the need of tears from the sun and the wind.”