“Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain.”

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

There’s beauty in pain, wisdom in sorrow.

Nobody is worth the pain, move on.

Because the most painful wars are the ones we lead against ourselves.

Pain can be heavy, sometimes leaving our hearts feeling fragile and empty.

Those who are capable of great love will always pay in great grief.

I’ve run out of pain, which is to say, I’ve run out of words.

Pain comes in waves, it can help us rise up but it can also knock us down.

No pain no worries only the beating of our hearts.