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

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.

A poem should not mean but be.