It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

We [Americans] inherited British law, which is like the new "reforms" that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history - the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here.

I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.

What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.

I'm really disturbed by the degree to which I don't hear people saying, "Are we leaving the world better than we found it?" I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that's just how things are.