Taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.