Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.