I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

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.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.