The Reading Room

“Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.”

“Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.”

“There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere.”

“Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if 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.”

“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”

“Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”

“Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”

“Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.”

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

“Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.”

“A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”

“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.”

“Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split one boulder.”

“I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.”

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

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

“Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.”

“I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.”

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

“I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.”

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

“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.”

“I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.”

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

“I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.”

“A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.”

“I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.”

“All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.”

“All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.”

“A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.”

“When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”

“I've written some poetry I don't understand myself”

“Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.”

“Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.”

“Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.”

“Love your neighbor as yourself, but don't take down the fence.”

“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.”

“Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.”

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

“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.”

“I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.”

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

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

“There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.”

“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.”

“I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.”

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”