Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness a covenant between radically different persons male and female and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen a covenant between radically different partners.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.