The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.