I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.
All we can do is go around telling the truth.
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
There are those who know and those who don’t know. And for every ten thousand who don’t know there’s only one who knows. That’s the miracle of all time – the fact that these millions know so much but don’t know this.
There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.
There are all these people here I don’t know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don’t have any connection. And they don’t know me and I don’t know them. And now I’m leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.
She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.
The world is certainty a sudden place.
I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?
To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.
Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.
You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.
People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.
I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.
Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.
In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.