Quotes from Daniel Mason

A world full of people who want to know what you will be, what is your skill and what is your purpose. In the north, if a man had come and said "What will you be? What will you do?" I would have laughed at this kind of person that lives all the time in the future.

The conversations rests uneasily; one doesn't expect good-byes to be burdened by such trivialities. This is not how it is in the books, he thinks, or in the theater, and he feels the need to speak of mission, of duty, of love. They reach home and close the door and he doesn't drop her hand. Where speech fails, touch compensates.

At times I wonder if the reason I have lost track of time is that I will know when to return not by a date, but when an emptiness is filled.

White. Like a clean piece of paper, like uncarved ivory, all is white when the story begins.

being needed was not the same as being accepted.

good piano tuner must have knowledge not only of his instrument but of "Physics, Philosophy, and Poetics," so that Edgar, although he never attended university, reached his twentieth birthday with more education than many who had.

that being needed was not the same as being accepted.

One learns a lot if others assume you are deaf to their tongue.

war. A balanced peace is a poor fertilizer for promotion.

While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.