The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.

The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.

The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.

Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.