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

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

For whatever you live is life.

History is all explained by geography.

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

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

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.