They were firemakers! They were gods! [humans]

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.

The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

There's only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappoint­ment s.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

So why isn't the world overrun with evil spirits?"Moira stared at her, a half-smile on her face. "Who says it isn't?

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

I don't like to sit and count my money and be a "happy entrepreneur".

I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.

The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

How to Achieve The New World Order

What's worse: a president who is very faithful to an ideology that you find extreme, or a president who is very cynical and appears to have no ideology at all? Neither one of those things is great.

Listen to presences inside poems.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none.