"Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats."

“I don't really like knees.”

Source : The Observer, August 3, 1958.

“It is not the reporter's job to be a patriot or to presume to determine where patriotism lies. His job is to relate the facts.”

“I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.”

“He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.”

“I was always an outsider, proud of being an outsider. I always reveled in the outsiders.”

Source : "At 60, 'Challenges Are Opportunities' For John Zorn". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, wbaa.org. September 3, 2013.

“It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.”

“Maternal love! thou word that sums all bliss, Gives and receives all bliss,-- fullest when most Thou givest! spring-head of all felicity, Deepest when most is drawn! emblem of God! O'erflowing most when greatest numbers drink!”

Source : Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans, Reginald Heber, Robert Pollok (1831). “The poetical works of Hemans, Heber and Pollok”

“when you're on the street, and, as you're walking along, a woman turns the corner going away from you, and for an instant you have a glimpse of the side of her face, of the gesture of her shoulder, the shape of her body, and you are committed... You are in love for an instant, or your senses are rocked for an instant. That person then disappears and is lost to you forever...”