We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
It isn’t like the rest of the country – it is like a nation itself – more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.
I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.
Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.
The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.
All we got is the family unbroke.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
Must hunger become anger and anger fury before anything will be done?
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.
The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.
I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security – out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.
A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.
Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.
Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.
I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe. – John Steinbeck.
A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.