In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

The world is a hungry place, and Anna will feed it beauty.

A muddied diamond is better than an unsullied pebble.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in

Because I've learned that you can't control what other people are going to think about you. The best you can do in life is not piss yourself off.

Don't like to do anything half-heartedly, even if it is a wicked and self-destructive avocation like smoking cigars

Love and kindness are the very basis of society. If we lose these feelings, society will face tremendous difficulties; the survival of humanity will be endangered.

You must be all a-tingle with excitement.' 'I guess so,' I said, but I did not feel a-tingle. I did not feel a-anything.

They [Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun] had their disagreements, it wasn't all sunshine and roses, but it isn't that way for any married couple.

In Pakistan anti-American protesters set a Kentucky Fried chicken restaurant on fire. The protesters mistakenly thought they were attacking high-ranking U.S. military official Colonel Sanders.