Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.

Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.

Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.