"It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present,"

"It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around..."

"I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not."

"Because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known"

"We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors."

"The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews."

"Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep."

"I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real."

"The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory."

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be."

"Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone... they will be forced to deal with pain."

"When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living."

"The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden."

"It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian."

"It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless."

"The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly."

"An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience."

"If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not."

"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."

"We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours."

"Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt."

"The future is like heaven - everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now."

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

"But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."

"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."

"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field."

"Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance."

"There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention."

"One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return."

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses"

"Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up"

"The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did--which was to hide."

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."