Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

the smell of lilacs crept poignantly into the room like a remembered spring.

Shrews are made, not born.

You can't drown your troubles ... because troubles can swim.

There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.

When you're counting alibis and not apples, one plus one equals none.

Common sense is a vastly overrated virtue. I myself prefer the spark of genius.

When someone gives me three reasons instead of one, I'm inclined not to believe any of them.

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

Violence is the instinctive response to fear.

With action experience grows, with travel outlooks grow, and with reflections wisdom grows.

Business is really more agreeable than pleasure it interests the whole mind . . . more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.

Now we are raising the debt limit 3 times, up to $8 trillion, so that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for the cost of our expenditures.

I'll be back 'round again, yes, I'll walk in time with you, old friend. And we'll find that place that we had danced in so long ago.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

Investment in AIDS will be repaid a thousand-fold in lives saved and communities held together.