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

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.

For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

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