Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

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.

Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid." "I know." "What am I going to do?" "You mean right now?" "Yes." "We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home." "Is everything going to be all right?" "Yes." "Tell me. Say it." "Everything is going to be all right.