But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.