America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

small talk comes from small bones

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.