The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.