There is no country but the heart.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

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

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.