What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Women are an alien race set down among us.