“The difference twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a ...”

“Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.”

“Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and...”

“Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare...”

“In life, he said, there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life...”

“Now many crises in peoples lives occur because the hero role that theyve assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, orthe same thing in ef...”

“Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new creat...”

“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, a...”

“She's the kind of girl who brings you to the moon without you even being aware. The kind of girl you trip in love with, The kind of girl you never forget.”

“Not every story is about a girl who dreams of romance, waiting impatiently and dramatically for a tall, handsome, strong man to fall hopelessly in love with, in the foolish hope that he will protec...”

“But perhaps she has given me the strength and the madness to write about the things that I once desired so long to put against the world.”