“Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never any of us are more than one-fourth fulfilled.”

“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.”

“Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never any of us are more than one-fourth fulfilled.”

“Experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.”

“One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.”

“The past is never where you think you left it.”

“Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with theintention to belong to, and share witheach other, a mystical estate; mysticalexactly in the sense that the realexperience cannot be communicated toothers, nor explained even to oneselfon rational grounds.”

“It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.”

“If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.”

“The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet REvolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927- there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgement has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.”

“It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy- there is always the enemy!- into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.”