Stephen Vincent Benet

Dreaming men are haunted men.

Life is not lost by dying life is lost minute by minute day by day in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate black sorcery stones.

(Abraham Lincoln's) weathered face was homely as a plowed field.

He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

As for what you're calling hard luck - well we made New England out of it. That and codfish.