The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.