I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

The greatest significance of the present student generation is that it is through them that the point of view of the subjugated is finally and inexorably being expressed.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.