A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

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

I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.

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.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.