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

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?

Writing, for me, is a search for God.

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.

Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

The world is certainty a sudden place.

Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else.

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.

You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.

A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.

I watch her blond head until it disappears around the bend, and I feel bare, like there’s nothing left to protect me against pain. Her absence stings worst of all.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

As if some dreadful fate would overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our fearful clinging to illusion.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

I wouldn’t have believed it. I still barely do, truthfully. I’m so continually fortunate that I keep coming across these smart, interesting, creative people who pick me. It’s just stupendous.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

From ages 10 to 12 or so, I barely remember anything.