“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.”

justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude.

Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage.

The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?

All we can do is go around telling the truth.

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?

I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.

It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

Sometimes this fellow’s music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light.

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