All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
America – it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.
Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
And who shall say – whatever disenchantment follows – that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.
Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here – here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labor and your dream.
A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.
O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again.
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me – and I think for all of us – not only our own hope, but America’s everlasting, living dream.
Only the dead know Brooklyn.