When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.

Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.