“We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want.”

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.

I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

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.

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

I am ready to obey as a child; :;but, not being a child, I think I ought to have a reason.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‘It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.’ This was a very healthy attitude.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!

I’m not a policy oriented person. I’m constrained to what I study. But educational policy has not yet taken adequate note of the whole child. Kids are not just their IQ or standardized test scores. It matters whether or not they show up, how hard they work.