I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.