Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

Living was no longer the grief behind him, but the anxiety ahead.

Lives are only one with living. How dare we, in our egos, claim catastrophe in the rise and fall of the individual entity? There is only Life, and we are beads strung on its strong and endless thread.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.

They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.

Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.