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

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

Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons–throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.

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.

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.

Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

This music was her-the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.

The writer must hew the phantom rock.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I have never gone to a doctor in my adult life, feeling instinctively that doctors meant either cutting or, just as bad, diet.

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.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.

Things are changing at such a rate that you really can’t get too familiar with anything that you own in relation to what sort of functionality it has in your life.

Your body must become familiar with its death – in all its possible forms and degrees – as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

This seems quite good, a bit familiar.’ Then I realise … It’s one of my movies. It’s a pretty odd feeling.

When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar.

We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point.