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

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

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.

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

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

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