Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Only priests and fools are fearless and I've never been on the best of terms with God.

She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.

Metal rusts, music lasts forever.

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

No hard feelings about that time in the Crucible when you mixed my salts and I was nearly blind for a day. No. No, really, drink up!

He had a bright, reckless tenor that was always wandering off, looking for notes in the wrong places.

I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.

Silence! coeval with eternity! thou wert ere Nature's self began to be; thine was the sway ere heaven was formed on earth, ere fruitful thought conceived creation's birth.

In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths.

You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy.

So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.

That worst evil of long dictatorships: the loss of all political experience.

I ran for myself, not Finland.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

There is nothing destroyed by sanctification but that which would destroy us.