Fonny and I just sat there... while the voices of the congregation rose and rose around us, without mercy... Teddy had the tambourine, and gave the cue to the piano player-I never got to know him: a long dark, evil-looking brother, with hands made for strangling; and with these hands he attacked the keyboard like he was beating the brains out of someone he remembered. No doubt the congregation had their memories, too, and they went to pieces. The church began to rock.

The future is like heaven-everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.

For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.

Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.