The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

I have begun in old age to understand...that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.