But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey.

When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

If the Lowland farmer spoke with an uncouth accent, dressed in rags, lived in a miserable hovel, and fed on the same grain he fed his animals, it was not because he was a savage but because the relentless marauding of the English left him with very little choice. As for why he didn’t simply cut his throat, the answer is that he was a Presbyterian and did not expect much in the way of earthly happiness.

Your reader is at least as bright as you are.

The nail doesn’t choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet.

Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed.

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise – except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

My father represented authority, which meant – to me – that he could not also represent understanding.

The music of Beethoven’s Fidelio always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I’m afraid, purely factitious – unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie’s joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament.

I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living.