Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something--forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

We write to make sense of it all.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.