A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

This early piece of the morning is mine.