The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.