“I longed to know the world's name.”

“Then after a long time Annie wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In the dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and be the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen.”

“Tell me a story. / In this century, and moment, of mania, tell me a story. / Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. / The name of the story will be time, / But you must not speak its name. / Tell me a story of deep delight.”

“(There is always another country and always another place.There is always another name and another face.And the name and the face are you, and youThe name and the face, and the stream you gaze intoWill show the adoring face, show the lips that lift to youAs you lean with the implacable thirst of self,As you lean to the image which is yourself,To set the lip to lip, fix eye on bulging eye,To drink not of the stream but of your deep identity,But water is water and it flows,Under the image on the water the water coils and goesAnd its own beginning and its end only the water knows.There are many countries and the rivers in them-Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Pecos, Little Big Horn,And Roll, Missouri, roll.But there is only water in them.And in the new country and in the new, placeThe eyes of the new friend will reflect the new faceAnd his mouth will speak to frameThe syllables of the new nameAnd the name is you and is the agitation of the airAnd is the wind and the wind runs and the wind is everywhere.The name and the face are you.And they are you.Are new.For they have been dipped in the healing flood.For they have been dipped in the redeeming blood.For they have been dipped in TimeAnd Time is only beginningsTime is only and always beginningsAnd is the redemption of our crimeAnd is our Saviour's priceless blood.For Time is always the new place,And no-place.For Time is always the new name and the new face,And no-name and no-face.For Time is motionFor Time is innocenceFor Time is West.)”

“I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.”

“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”

“He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.”