depth of human experience Quotes

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won't work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Here's the problem: the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil.

I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

A child who has a grandparent has a softened view of life, the feeling that there is more to life than what we see, more than getting and gaining, winning and losing.

Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

Perception has always interested me. The idea thatbehind every face, there are a thousand faces. Beneath the placidveneer of middle America, there lies terror.

The poet's pen is the true divining rod Which trembles towards the inner founts of feeling; Bringing to light and use, else hid from all, The many sweet clear sources which we have of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms; And marks the variations of all mind As does the needle.

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

Exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel.

Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.

The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.

He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.