No. I won’t want it ever. I would have been so happy if you could have given me – well, what your brother has – pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn’t stack up with that.” His eyes widened a little and he said, “Have I made you angry, son? Don’t be angry. If you want to give me a present – give me a good life. That would be something I could value.
Your days are like pages, the chapters unread. You have to keep turning your book has no end.
I want to take everything I’ve seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use. And I can’t seem to do it.
People don’t take trips – trips take people.
And at that moment he saw that Merlin was already standing in the entrance of the tent, and Merlin smiled, for he took joy in causing wonder.
The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable.
These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes.
It’s because I’ve stopped seeing. When that happens you think you’ll never see again.
It’s nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.
If it is right, it happens-the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
He’s eating God the way a bear eats meat against the winter.
The new migrants from the dust bowl are here to stay. They are the vest American stock, intelligent, resourceful; and, if given a chance, socially responsible. To attempt to force them into a peonage of starvation and intimidated despair will be unsuccessful. They can be citizens of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering to take what they need. On their future treatment will depend the course they will be force to take.
I was told that since my photograph was as widely distributed as my publisher could make it, I would find it impossible to move about without being recognized. Let me say in advance that in over ten thousand miles, in thirty-four states, I was not recognized even once.
I think he didn’t like himself, and when that is so the subject usually must find an area for dislike outside himself.
Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry... Whatever you do, it will be you who do it-not your mother.
Tom Wolfe was right,” he reflected. “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
The smell of azaleas and the sleepy smell of sun working with chlorophyll filled the air.
One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
Charles is not afraid. So he could never learn anything of courage.
We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity.