Next to music beer was best.

Imagination takes humility, love and great courage.

Don't you loathe it when doctors use the word 'we' when it applies only and solely to yourself?

Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.