“Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.”

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.

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.

Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.

Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one’s role in relation to all other beings.

When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experence.

When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.

It is essential for me to become involved in another search, and ‘search’ is the proper word to use because it promises discovery along with the risk.

The sage has the sun and moon by his side and the universe under his arm. He blends everything into a harmonious whole. . . . He blends the disparities of ten thousand years into one complete purity. All things are blended like this and mutually involve each other.

I’m certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.

He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.