I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.

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

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.