I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Death is woven in with the violets, ” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

I never stopped loving her, " he said. "I couldn’t let her go. Once the past gets you in its clutches, well, you’ve got to want to fight to be released. I never did. That was my mistake.

There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference by philosophy and by religion.

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

So let's talk about Islam the way we talk about everything else.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

I take it very seriously when I take the pulpit. That I'm representing God.

Foreign meddling elections is bad whether it's done by the Russians here or by us or anyplace else.

There's a lot of cultural pressure around specialness and seeing your family. I feel like everything gets jacked up a little bit because of all of these expectations of love and family bonding.

God is a placebo for your own mortality.

Leaders are not born, they're made.