“Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“A man is a lonely thing.”

“Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.”

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”

“A man that don't love a Horse, there is something the matter with him. If he has no sympathy for the man that does love Horses, then there is something worse the matter with him.”

“There's nobody as lonely as an all-married man.”

“There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.”

“ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.”

“If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.”