Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.