Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.

She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.