Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

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

I was up day and night with Lincoln for years. I couldn't have picked a better companion.