As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
No one who is young is ever going to be old.
It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight.
The land is so much more than its analysis.
If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.
The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.
Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.
Oh, the strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!
An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.
When Kino had finished, Juana came back to the fire and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction – and that was conversation.
Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.
It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.
Intention, good or bad, is not enough.