A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.