Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
I have always been the lover – never the beloved – and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.
Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.
A page of good prose remains invincible.
Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.
Homesickness is absolutely nothing,” she said angrily. “It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.
In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it.
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.
The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began.
For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.
Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.
But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.
Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?
There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two – a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.
He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache. Like many great healers, he meant to heal himself.