You cannot fix what you will not face.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.