Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

You men,' she says. 'You durn men.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.