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.

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

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

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

There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way.

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