Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost.

Our nation was horrified, but it's not going to be terrorized.

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.

The surest method against scandal is live it down in well-doing.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

I've always wanted to play a soldier and I'd never taken on a character where I'm the happy-go-lucky protagonist. I've played a lot of jerks recently.

I'd learned a thing or two. Hope strengthens. Fear kills.

The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals.

Remember there is plenty of room at the top-but not enough to sit down.