Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.

Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.

The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.

The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.