I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.
You’ve seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it’s an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?
He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.
No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.
It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.
Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.
I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.
In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.
Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is – and a woman too, I guess.
For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man – and the Word is with Men.
To the heavens on the wings of a pig.