Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.