“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”

“The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.”

“It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.”

“For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”

“... her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.”

“The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.”