“Well, who begun it?” That's what at the end of a war We always say not who won it, Or what it was foughten for. - Robert Frost

It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage...

I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle. It keeps the reader from criticism. Whittier, when he shows any style at all is probably a greater person than Longfellow as he is lifted priestlike above consideration of the scornful. Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody's doubt whatsoever. At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to this side of the standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.