When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

For the truth is a terrible thing.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.