"The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe...Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes."

"Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?"

"He was himself and he had lost the speed He started with, and he was left behind."

"You have made The cement of your churches out of tears And ashes, and the fabric will not stand."

"A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay— As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away."

"Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head."

"I shall have more to say when I am dead."

"The gods are growing old; The stars are singing Golden hair to gray Green leaf to yellow leaf,—or chlorophyl To xanthophyl, to be more scientific."

"Your Dollar is your only Word, The wrath of it your only fear. You build it altars tall enough To make you see, but your are blind; You cannot leave it long enough To look before you or behind."

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

"Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."

"No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel"

"If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God."

"We are young And we are friends of time."

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words."

"The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity."

"Oh for a poet - for a beacon bright"

"Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls."

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."

"It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be."

"A poem should not mean But be."

"What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists."

"We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves."

"Another poem that I loved first as music, later pondered for what it could tell me about women and men and marriage, was Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos":"

"I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible."

"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."

"The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old."

"If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out."

"Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself—like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks."

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap."

"Children are different—mentally, physically, spiritually, quantitatively, qualitatively; and furthermore, they're all a little bit nuts."

"Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house."

"I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it."

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?"

"Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents."

"The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet."

"You can't sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don't count)."

"If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, it's just possible that you haven't grasped the situation."

"I will read anything rather than work."

"Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one."

"Complex in her privacy, refusing to be controlled by an audience or pinioned to a single representation, she once told Henry Ramont of the New York Times, "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it.""

"She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good."

"A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same."

"Destiny and history are untidy."

"A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself — and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?"

"Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself."

"Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations."

"The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment."

"One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it."