The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

Wine is a civilizing agent.

The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.