I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.
Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.
I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.
You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.
Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen – maybe.
Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.
Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.
The shovel is the brother to the gun.
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
What is there more of in the world than anything else? Ends.
Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.
To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.
People lie because they don’t remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can’t help making a story better than it was the way it happened.
The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.
Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.