The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

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.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.