Marx said that he had stood Hegel on his head; often Mr. [Horace] Gregory has simply stood Pollyana on her head. - Randall Jarrell

The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas — the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”

A farmer is separated from a farmer By what farmers have in common: forests, Those dark things — what the fields were to begin with. At night a fox comes out of the forest, eats his chickens. At night the deer come out of the forest, eat his crops.

...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.