Dying ain’t in people’s plans, is it?
Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.
I don’t think goodness is something that you learn. If you’re left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble.
Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.
Teaching writing is a hustle.
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way.
I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen.
In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.
Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.
Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don’t it?
It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?
I ain’t got an original thought in my head. If it ain’t got the scent of divinity to it, I ain’t interested in it.
I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.
Men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.