History is all explained by geography.

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

Everything seems an echo of something else.

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.

You become what you think, not what others think of you.

The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you but he will make a fool of himself too.

Unless, of course, you insist on identifying yourself with the people and things you love; and thereby seriously disturb yourself.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

Mormonism is the pure doctrine of Jesus Christ; of which I myself am not ashamed.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

Before me is the abyss. How can I leap across it? And if I do not leap, how shall I ever be able to reach God?

We can never be like lillies in the garden unless we have spent time as bulbs in the dark, totally ignored.

Finland, and all the other European countries, we are too dependent on imported energy. We should be using a broader variety of energy resources.

There's a certain delusional quality that all successful people have to have.