It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

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

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.

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

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

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

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.