Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on "West-Running Brook.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.

It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige.