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.

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.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

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

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.