“When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?”

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

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

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.

What I might feel like is hard work, another person is dying to do.

Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

I am not afraid; I was born to do this.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story.

Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

If you get knocked down – setbacks in life, like applying for a job if they don’t hire you – keep trying, keep getting up, keep doing it.

Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

… since God commanded me to go, I must do it.