Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
I’m inclined to think that a military background wouldn’t hurt anyone.
The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.
Hemingway shot himself. I don’t like a man that takes the short way home.
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if we were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather’s desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company’s good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That’s because they’re not interested in the facts, only the truth.