Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.