Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
They are the we of me.
But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.
The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.
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.
I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.
Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.
I was like a cat always climbing the wrong tree.
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.
Passion is more important than justice.
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
Don’t you loathe it when doctors use the word ‘we’ when it applies only and solely to yourself?
That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended.
Doctors, by God; washing their hands, looking out windows, fiddling with dreadful things while you are stretched out on a table or half undressed on a chair.
Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.
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.
The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.