“The human heart is a dark forest”

“I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.”

“There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer because you have the liber...”

“In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Plea...”

“I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world ...”

“Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story hed led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering...”

“Any negotiation has a limit. Otherwise, war is irrelevant.”

“Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could ...”

“When someone is hard on you it may have very little to do with you.”

“Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.”

“I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even ...”

“It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embr...”