“This is the way history happens: it is measured out in days rather than epochs.”

“Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.”

“No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.”

“A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.”

“I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.”

“The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary...Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”