And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good….

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 i….

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good..

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. Histo….

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see..

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this..

For whatever you live is life..

Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the….

Everything seems an echo of something else..

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of..

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All….

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do….

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….

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. Th….

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us.….

For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when yo….

I longed to know the world's name..

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark nig….

Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and tha….

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events..

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it..