“One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.”

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Source: Lectures on Philosophy

Source: Catching Fire

The Basic Teachings - Part 1: Principles of the Teaching (2009)

Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered at Washington University (9 June 1953) published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis : Washington University Press, 1953), p. 6
Context: It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 2

"Cat in an Empty Apartment"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The End and the Beginning (1993)
Context: Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Source: The Body in the Library