I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

I had a lot of fun driving race cars, but it wasn't my No. 1 priority.

Cannibals are devouring senators.

Spending that many hours in the saddle gave a man plenty of time to think. That's why so many cowboys fancied themselves Philosophers.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it's scary. And the bear because it's intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.

There is only one race ... and it is human!