If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

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

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

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

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff...Willie, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they'll love it and come back for more, but, for heaven's sakes, don't try to improve their minds.

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