For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

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

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

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

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

I longed to know the world's name.

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.