If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.

you are a lover of the wordsa soul mate to the storyeverything becomes a part of youfrom my fingertips to your eyesfrom my heart to yours

Even though we don’t realize it, every moment we begin our adventure in the unknown future of life.

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

I don't debate with liars.

That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all.

The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.

If I were playing today I'd do what Joe DiMaggio said. I'd go knock on the door at Yankee Stadium and when George Steinbrenner answered I'd say, 'Howdy, pardner.'

All I asked was, where do I sign? Some of the other navy men said I was rooting for the war to last forever. (after Browns gave him a monthly stipend during the war)

No flattery, boy! an honest man cannot live by it; it is a little, sneaking art, which knaves use to cajole and soften fools withal.