If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.