For whatever you live is life.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

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

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.