The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.