You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

For fear you will be aloneyou do so many thingsthat aren’t you at all.

Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.

There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.

The world needs Christians who don't tolerate the complacency of their own lives.

There is no fyre without some smoke.

Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.

Thus, if armaments were curtailed without a secure peace and all countries disarmed proportionately, military security would have been in no way affected.

Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith.

Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.

If you see something, say something.