A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp.
The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.
It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.
Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all...
Death is the great gamer with a sleeve of tricks.
The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.
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.