How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

Every young artist has to do it one way, his way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you're doing. Nobody else can do anything for you and you really wouldn't want them to anyway. And never take advice, including this.

... the kitchen, where all the fair prospects of life were centered.

I don't see no reason to hold it against a man because he went loony once or twice in his lifetime ...

Your mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away.

She wanted to believe that tomorrow, or at least the day after, life, such a battle at best, was going to be better.

... who read as naturally and constantly as ponies crop grass, and with much the same kind of pleasure ...

"We've all got to be young once," said Mr. Thompson. "It's like the measles, it breaks out all over you, and you're a nuisance to yourself and everybody else, but it don't last, and it usually don't leave no ill effects."