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.

For whatever you live is life.

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

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

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

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