The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.