My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years,and passengers ask the conductor- What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

Come on, you Do you want to live forever?

Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.