History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.

...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.

History is all explained by geography.

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

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

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.