You’ve got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan, Sally said. I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.
You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.
Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.
Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...
You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?
Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely ho...
Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—...
The sound of anything coming at you—a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute th...
The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment...
She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14.
I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats...
How do I know what I think till I see what I say?
Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persis...
A daughter at home resting up from her husband--who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People's Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the wor...
Within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —
Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I h...
He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man
For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomer...