I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.