I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?