For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed an...
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Justina’s life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us.
What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet.
This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did...
Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy’s old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile.
Among the rewards of his expatriation were a heightened awareness of what he saw and an exhilarating sense of freedom. Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the pla...
A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassiona...
The sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There...