“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.”

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.

The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.

The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.

There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

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