In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.
Silence is exhilarating at first – as noise is – but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.
There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.
No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.
Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.
A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller...
There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.
It’s incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.
Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga – stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.
Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.
Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.
If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it’s not alright; they think he’s crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy...
Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.
City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind’s eye the notion of a better life ahead.
There aren’t many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.
The question of whether it’s God’s green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.