Don't give anybody up." He stroked her. "Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us." "There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, "There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help."

When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.

Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.