“Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.”

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who – one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings.

The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.

The writer is by nature a dreamer – a conscious dreamer.

I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth?

All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud.

I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.

Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order.

If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

What I might feel like is hard work, another person is dying to do.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

If I never make another dollar, I am proud. I did what I wanted to do.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

A girl phoned me the other day and said… ‘Come on over, there’s nobody home.’ I went over. Nobody was home.