“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.”

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

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.

I’m lucky to have family around me. Otherwise, I’ll be taking the risk of falling in love with myself.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and the sniff.

We kiss again and this time, it feels familiar.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.

People want to know about the details of politicians, what they like doing in their spare time, about their families. I think that’s human.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.