Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

There are special, strange gifted people in the world and they have to be treated with understanding

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.