People always ask: For whom does the poet write? He needs only to answer, For whom do you do good? Are you kind to your daughter because in the end s… - Randall Jarrell

Death and the devil, what are these to him? His being accuses him — and yet his face is firm In resolution, in absolute persistence; The folds of smiling do for steadiness; The face is its own fate — a man does what he must — And the body underneath it says: I am.

Since Pharaoh’s bits were pushed into the jaws of kings, these dyings — patient or impatient, but dyings — have happened, by the hundreds of millions; they were all wasted. They taught us to kill others and to die ourselves, but never how to live. Who is “taught to live” by cruelty, suffering, stupidity, and that occupational disease of soldiers, death?

...when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.