“If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.”

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.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

It is my dying wish to travel around the world; to feel this hurt in a slightly different way!

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

Be around people that make your problems seem smaller and the possibility of life much bigger.

If you keep quiet and claim that your silence speaks, you’re silently part of the cruelty that goes around you. Thus make your voice sing.

Sometimes the words just fall out of me when I’m around you. So there’s no need to say I’m talented, I’m just lucky to have you as my muse.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him, men who were cleverer than himself

Love is in the air everywhere I look around. Love is in the air every sight and every sound.