I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one's own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don't find it, but it's there.

we live our fate before we realize exactly what it is.

Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.