I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.

The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.