If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

In the end, there is no end.

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

She'd been pounding her location and thoughts into a device that would send those things to virtually any human with Internet access and yet looking over her shoulder had been a violation of privacy.

To know God and to make Him known.

While I encourage people to save 100% down for a home, a mortgage is the one debt that I don't frown upon.

Knowledge, wisdom, and understanding don't come out of the microwave. You got to keep moving forward because the evil doesn't sleep.

I still don’t know if this is a good quality or a bad one, to be able to be in the moment and then step out of it.

The (Academy Award) ceremonies are a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.

A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy.

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

There is a vast difference between failure and temporary defeat.