We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

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.

Although initially only few in numbers, it seems my gray hairs have launched an effective peer-pressure campaign intended to convert the others.

Living a life fully engaged in full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget.

I can get a dance party started pretty much anywhere and anytime.

This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve.

Yes, I'm back," he said, "And look who I ran into." Horace grinned at him. "i hope you ran into him hard." "As hard as I could.

I'm all for whatever it takes to get wherever you need to get with a character, as long as you don't wipe it on me.

It's a hard concept for me to wrap my head around to completely sacrifice any sort of love in your life, to never experience that on a personal level.

Life is sweet, life is also very short.

You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.

Sincere compliments cost nothing and can accomplish much. In any relationship, they are the applause that refreshes.