The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.