“And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.”

“Not everything is about beating your head against the wall until it breaks.”
“Just most things.”

“Certainly, we live in a different world … for the first time in all of known human history, we live in a world absent of the likelihood of superpower conflict. Now we live in a world in which there are superpowers, but we're not butting heads all the time. That's a very good thing for the world… but… there's still a few bad guys out there.”

“Congratulations to the Italian people for winning the World Cup. … They won after France’s best player got ejected for head butting. That’s the closest anyone in a French uniform has come to combat in 60 years”

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

“In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers”

“And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.”

“The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.”

“All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true.”

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet Grace must still look so.”