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.
Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.
There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
I don’t know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius – I know it too well to blush behind it.
Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.
By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
For he had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out – through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused.
She was buried in his flesh. She throbbed in the beat of his pulses. She was wine in his blood, a music in his heart.
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.
I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.
The traveller gets out, walks up and down the platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity, greeting, and farewell, – that lonely, strange, and poignantly wordless feeling that Americans know so well.