You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one to make a living in these times.

You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

she knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near

The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.