Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing.She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself

There is nothing better in the whole world than to know you have set a goal and achieved it.

People have some really crazy ideas about love, friends and relationships. They have the absurd belief that their friends, children, family, lovers and companions can make them happy.

We have believed-and we do believe now-that freedom is indivisible that peace is indivisible that economic prosperity is indivisible.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

Under most conditions, the best roof for your bedroom is the sky. This commonsense arrangement saves weight, time, energy, and money.

Our duty is to understand youth, but more, to help them understand themselves that they may release their varied abilities... We must help them to discover a life work, not work for life.

Ideas really do matter. But in any organization a good idea will only go so far unless its proponents are willing to fight the political games to get the idea adopted.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.

I never stopped loving you. Even when I tried desperately to forget you, I couldn't.