I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.