
Source: Psychologie des Foules [The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind] (1895)
Source: The Woman in the Dunes
Source: Psychologie des Foules [The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind] (1895)
Preface
Sackett's Land (1974)
Context: We are all of us, it has been said, the children of immigrants and foreigners — even the American Indian, although he arrived here a little earlier. What a man is and what he becomes is in part due to his heritage, and the men and women who came west did not emerge suddenly from limbo. Behind them were ancestors, families, and former lives. Yet even as the domestic cattle of Europe evolved into the wild longhorns of Texas, so the American pioneer had the characteristics of a distinctive type.
Physically and psychologically, the pioneers' need for change had begun in the old countries with their decision to migrate. In most cases their decisions were personal, ordered by no one else. Even when migration was ordered or forced, the people who survived were characterized by physical strength, the capacity to endure, and not uncommonly, a rebellious nature.
History is not made only by kings and parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger, thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow. In writing my stories I have found myself looking back again and again to origins, to find and clearly see the ancestors of the pioneers.
Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)
“Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry…”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
“Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.”
Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121
A Tale of Three Lions (1887), CHAPTER I, THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS
“Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.”