There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.
The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.
The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.
The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty.
She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.
I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?
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.
There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.
When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?
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.
After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.
The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?