Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Albert Camus

To be an poet at twenty is to be twenty: to still be an poet at fifty is to be a poet.
Eugene Delacroix

"Nights are long just now,
short though
when twilight is on the skin
and someone’s breath is mingling with someone’s hair."

– Paavo Haavikko, from “The Short Year”