I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won’t betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

You may talk. And I may listen. And miracles might happen.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.