Eugenio Montale

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. ”

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know. ”

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry. ”

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion. ”

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought. ”

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant? ”