All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.

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.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don't know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.