“One universe, one body...in this urnthe animal night sweats of the spirit burn”

“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”

“I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”

“In the end, there is no end.”

“The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.”

“Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gently tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die--when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.”

“Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heel of smallwar--until the end of timeto police the earth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime”