The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

First sentences are doors to worlds.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.