Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.