Ted Hughes said this quote

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

~ Ted Hughes

He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.

~ Ted Hughes

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

~ Ted Hughes

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

~ Ted Hughes