A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Only God and I knew what I meant when I wrote it, now only God knows

I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.