"Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."

"We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough."

"You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget."

"The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help."

"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."

"I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago."

"I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter."

"Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed."

"The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect."

"I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie."

"My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall."

"Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes."

"In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning."

"Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence."

"I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way."

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment."

"Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen."

"I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends."