Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

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

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

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