From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

Friends you have, people you love, die and are born again.

On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.