There is no country but the heart.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

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.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

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