Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What is man but his passion?
For whatever you live is life.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
I longed to know the world's name.
For the truth is a terrible thing.
There is no country but the heart.
History is all explained by geography.
You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.
Everything seems an echo of something else.
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?
If a man knew how to live he would never die.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.
In separateness only does love learn definition.
Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.
The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.
Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.
It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.
I reckon I am a smart aleck, but it is just a way to pass the time.
The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.
There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.
The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.
Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?
You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.
There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.
To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.
If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.
So little time we live in Time, And we learn all so painfully, That we may spare this hour's term To practice for Eternity.
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.
[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
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 The King's Men)