In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for.….

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that t….

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever..

One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not hal….

Memory is a magnet. It will pull to it and hold only material nature has designed it to attract..

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing..

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt..

Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life..

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own..

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures..

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are fr….

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all..

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself..

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter..

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungl….

The conversation of two people remembering, if the memory is enjoyable to both, rocks on like music or lovemaking. There is a rhythm and a predictabi….

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future..

Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should sur….

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary..

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain..

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave..