“Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.

He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

She was the captain of her soul

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts… That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth…

Try to be better than yourself.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.

I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat