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.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

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

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.