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

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

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 the truth is a terrible thing.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

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.