Everything seems an echo of something else.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

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

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'll never know what you're capable of if you never take the first step and try.

In real love you want the other person's good.

Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.

Perfect self-expression will never be labor, but of such absorbing interest that it will seem almost like play.

Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

It feels good to come here and be a winning program.

While Daddy liked to stick to the rules, Mummy liked to bend them.

One finds many companions for food and drink, but in a serious business a man's companions are very few.

I hate the ballplayer who says, 'I did everything I could have possibly done.' Because if you didn't win it all, you obviously didn't do everything you could have done.

red hair is caused by sugar and lust.